An Appreciation of John Stewart: America’s Lonesome Picker
January 25th, 2008 | 6:00 pm est |
Singer and songwriter John Stewart passed away on Saturday, January 19, 2008. Stewart died in the same San Diego hospital where he had been born. While the obits have been plentiful, and the big songs and albums cited, I decided to look into the long career of Stewart as a songwriter, at what he brought, at the right time, to a thoroughly confused America, one embroiled in a foreign war, and one that had lost four of its most visionary leaders in John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. Stewart traveled extensively with the younger Kennedy on his campaign trail. Along with singing partner — and later wife — Buffy Ford, they played on flatbed trucks, from the backs of trains, on stages at rallies. Stewart recorded an album in 1986 called The Last Campaign and filled it with songs written during and about that time.
Most people know that Stewart got his start when he joined the Kingston Trio in 1961 after Dave Guard left. What most don’t know, is that Stewart sang some of the group’s biggest hits, like “Molly Dee” and “Greenback Dollar,” and began contributing songs to the group almost immediately. By the time he left in 1967, he was the group’s chief songwriter. While his early songs, such as “When My Love Was Here,” from 1961’s Close-Up, and “The New Frontier,” from the album of the same name in 1963, showed him to be a formidable talent, it was his later work that offered a view of America that obsessed him until he died. The 1966 Kingston Trio set Children of the Morning featured no less than nine Stewart tunes.
- Molly Dee
- Greenback Dollar
Stewart’s first solo record was a duet album with Ford called Signals Through the Glass. It looked at the vast expanse of an America that was still enough of a myth to warrant a view infused with the sounds of its landscapes (“Mucky Truckee River”) and the visions of its heroes and outlaws, from Abe Lincoln (“Lincoln’s Train”) to the women who embodied its hopes and bore its burdens (“July, You’re a Woman” and “Nebraska Widow”), to Jack Kerouac’s hero Cody Pomeray (“Cody”) and those being drafted into service in Vietnam (“Draft Age”).
- July, You’re a Woman
- Cody
But it was 1969’s California Bloodlines on Capitol that put Stewart on the map as the king of his own castle and as a songwriter of note. Recorded in Nashville with some of the same players who appeared on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, it may be — arguably — the very first record that could really be called Americana, as it embodied folk and country traditions and looked straight out at a rock and pop audience and invited them in without compromise. The title track, using California as its microcosm, bit into something as transcendent as Ralph Waldo Emerson, as romantic and visionary as Walt Whitman, as rebellious as John Steinbeck, as redemptive as John Ford, and as sadly prophetic as Jack Kerouac. Yet the songs on the album reflected a majestic and publicly innocent nation that was as contradictory as the images in Andrew Wyeth’s paintings and the photographs of Walker Evans. Stewart’s lyrics were literary, but they spoke plainly; they were rooted in history, novels, and the everyday life settings that Cisco Houston’s and Woody Guthire’s songs were a generation before. California Bloodlines scored big on the charts, and was his biggest album — though seven more found a place in the Billboard’s Top 200. It is a classic to be sure; but though it’s his best-known offering, it is not Stewart’s classic.
- California Bloodlines
- Omaha Rainbow
Willard followed a year later on Capitol. By this time, Stewart was well into being his own keeper as an artist, and didn’t play record company games very well. Before Willie and Waylon, Stewart was an outlaw: one who played by his own rules and recorded his own way. The evidence is found here in producer Peter Asher’s repeated attempts to tame the wildness in Stewart’s reedy voice — none of which worked. The songs on Willard, though sonically close to those on California Bloodlines, with many of the same pickers, are even richer poetically and more poignantly haunting.
- Belly Full of Tennessee
- Julie, Judy, Angel, Rain
- Hero from the War
- Earth Rider
Stewart’s run on Capitol was a good one, but after these two outings, it continued on recordings for Warner Brothers and RCA, on albums like Sunstorm, The Lonesome Picker Rides Again, Cannons in the Rain, and The Complete Phoenix Concerts. They stand with their predecessors as milestones in terms of their creativity, their lasting import, and the singularity of vision that their creator — backed by some of the best California and Nashville musicians — imbued them with. In retrospect, they served as a less decorative template for the Laurel Canyon scene. That said, it is also true these albums have little in common with those of Jackson Browne, CSNY, or Joni Mitchell, who began in the folk clubs of the early ’60s. Stewart was an influence because everyone heard those records and was inspired by them; yet nobody had quite the same grasp on the enormity of America as it filtered down to the individual while remaining firmly itself. The aforementioned artists of the ‘70s came at it from the individual’s perspective and didn’t have the imagistic reach as it encountered the history of American mythos and allegory that Stewart did.
It was on 1971’s Lonesome Picker Rides Again that Stewart recorded his own version of “Daydream Believer,” the song that had been such a smash for the Monkees in 1968, and the song he is best known for. The irony here is that without the strings and multi-layered production inherent in the pop group’s reading, the meaning of the song itself changes considerably. Lonesome Picker’s final two tracks, “Wild Horse Road” and “All the Brave Horses,” add layers of meaning to that song, and offer a sweeping, epic look at the romantic American myth in a period of uncertain transition. This is the place in American popular art where Ford’s westerns meet Kerouac’s Desolation Angels and try to hash it out on the road.
- Daydream Believer
- Wild Horse Road
- All the Brave Horses
The Complete Phoenix Concerts, issued in 1974, showcased Stewart with a harder, rootsier, rocking sound, with a crack country-rock band that knew their folk cadences well because they were weaned on them and not the Beatles or the Byrds. The band included Nashville session ace Dan Dugmore, drummer Jim Gordon, and Buffy Ford on backing vocals. Ford and Stewart were wed a year later. Stewart showcased definitive performances of some of his best songs.
- Kansas Rain
- Last Campaign Trilogy
- Wheatfield Lady
- Cops
Stewart’s chart run continued in the 1970s with albums like Wingless Angels and Fire in the Wind, though they were far slicker, less topical affairs. They did, however, reflect in their own way the decadence of the 1970s. They were setting the stage for Bombs Away Dream Babies, recorded in 1979 with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham produced the set, and Stewart scored his biggest single with “Gold,” with the FM pair on backing vocals and Stewart’s trademark minor-key guitar sound pushing the cut to the margin. Other notables on this set included actress Mary Kay Place on bass and backing vocals, Ford, and drummer Russ Kunkel. Stewart hit the Top 40 with two more singles off the album as well, with “Lost Her in the Sun” and “Midnight Wind.” The strange thing is, that while the music was much slicker and very much of its time, Stewart’s themes hadn’t changed all that much, though his insights were darker, deeper, and more disillusioned.
- Gold
- Lost Her in the Sun
- Midnight Wind
Stewart lost his way musically for a while in the ‘80s (as did a lot of people — Dylan, anybody?) swinging for the pop fences on his next couple albums. He found his path again with 1983’s satirical and poignant Revenge of the Budgie on the Takoma imprint and then recorded a masterpiece with The Last Campaign. To this day, it is a profoundly moving meditation on Kennedy’s campaign and assassination and what happened to the country in its aftermath. It was as if Stewart had gone full circle and looked back at a place he still believed in but no longer saw.
- Medley: Clack Clack/Oldest Living Son
- Dreamers on the Rise
- Hearts and Dreams on the Line
- Last Campaign Reprise
Punch the Big Guy, released in 1987 on Shanachie, is one of Stewart’s finest offerings and one of his least known. While the production sounds dated, the songs are enduring and offer a perfect distillation of the themes he had explored in his own songs for 20 years, albeit from the other side of the American Dream. The album featured a host of talents like Bela Fleck, Rosanne Cash, Steven Soles, Bill Loyd, Sam Bush, Ashley Cleveland, and Edgar Meyer, and was produced by Garry Velletri. It is a consistently fine set of through-the-glass-darkly reflections and includes “Runaway Train,” a bona fide hit when Cash recorded it.
- Runaway Train
- Strange Rivers
- Botswanna
- Midnight of the World
Stewart continued to record for Shanchie, and later for his own Homecoming and the Folk Era label. It is on this last label that Stewart — who many had thought simply disappeared — recorded his last truly great album, called Rough Sketches. The songs were indeed that, quickly written and recorded tunes after two summer trips up and down Route 66. Stewart had recorded the romance of America’s New Frontier two decades before and its fall into oblivion in the later ‘70s. But this nearly raw, immediate, and deeply moving collection — by a singer whose voice was in deep decline by this time — reflected the beauty found in the shadows, the treasures in landscape ignored by real estate developers and snake oil hucksters with their empty promises of riches and “the good life.” Stewart at his best had always been able to see that what was left by the wayside as forgotten was as big and majestic as ever. These songs also found grace in flaws, and what is unspeakably wondrous in the neglected parts of a past that, try as we might, could never erase no matter how fast we ran into the “new.” Self-produced and obscure, it remains a testament to his immense gift and contribution.
- Spirit of the Road
- The Dogs of San Jon
- Because of a Dancer
- Cadillac Ranch
Stewart continued to record and release albums until his passing. Of these, Bandera, Teresa & Lost Songs (the title refers to Mother Teresa), and Havana stand out because they all contain fine songs, revealing the true grit and sinew of Stewart the songwriter — though the singer’s voice had been reduced to a croaky whisper, barely recognizable from the expressive baritone. But even in this there is real worth and something worthy of inspiration: Stewart was an artist whose work was not so much a profession as a vocation. He continued trying to refine it, whether or not anybody listened. He remained true to it until he exited the sphere, leaving a body of work that should — and will, hopefully — be appreciated for what it was: a musical chronicle in folk, country, pop, and rock of America as it passed from its stature of unquestionable greatness into one that looked in the mirror in confusion and shadow and barely recognized itself. To Stewart, despite all of this, it remained a place of myth and iconography, a terrain where hope was still a last stand for freedom on an as-yet-undefined frontier inside itself — despite the ambivalence of its 21st century character and what it has shown the world these last 30 years. This was not social or political naïveté; it was poetry in action, the dream spoken, echoed, and refrained continually while looking at the shabbiness of what it had become. Stewart stood tall and looked at it all in the eye with the proper yearning and wistfulness, and the indignation that makes hope possible where mere optimism fails. In his songs embodied the poet, the rambler, the dreamer, the romantic, the worker, and the Jeremiad prophet. In the grain of his voice was a realist who could see things not only as they are, but perhaps could be. We shall not see one like him for a long time, if ever.
- Keeper of the Flame
- Teresa
- The Star in the Black Sky Shining
Sad to hear that he passed away. He will be remembered. He had a very special voice that could touch your heart.
-Alvaro
Truly, John Stewart was an American treasure.
Thanks for the review. - jb
I was thinking of John Stewart this morning on the train, specifically of the song “Mother Country” from “California Bloodlines”, but was unaware of his death until I read this post this evening.
This is sad news. I was introduced to Stewart while living in England in the early 1970s. He was one of those amazing American figures like Gene Clarke who seemed to operate on a different level from most of current singer-songwriter crop; to an Englishman the music was expansive, romantic and full of a sweet allure that I suspect contributed to my moving to Missouri - “Missouri Birds”.
I remember being knocked out by his deeply funky and amusing version of “Daydream Believer”, thrilling to that deep, dark vibrato, and always being astonished by the economy and precision of his songwriting.
I seriously doubt if there is an American songwriter - Dylan included - who caught the spirit of his country in all its breadth and contradictions more perfectly than Stewart.
He’ll be missed.
He influenced so much from Springsteen to Ducks de Luxe, from Johnny Cash to Simon & Garfunkel, from Albert Hammond to P.F. Sloan, Don Henley, Jean Patrick Capdevielle. etc.
He was a giant. We won’t ever see no one like him.
I was 14 when I first hesrd his early albums, my older brother had just left home for the military and I inherited his record collection, at the time I was into Bad Company, Grand Funk, etc., I started playing his records, among them California Bloodlines and Willard, I played them both late one night and was deeply moved by John’s words and descriptions of American life, it all rang true and still does all these years later, John truly was and is “American” music, bless you John, you sang from the bottom of your soul and touched me in mine.
He was a huge hit in the Phoenix of my youth. I wrote this review of his work in 1992 in the Phoenix New Times. http://search.phoenixnewtimes.com/1992-12-09/music/a-star-is-worn-still-searching-for-mass-appeal-john-stewart-will-always-be-famous-in-phoenix/
He will be missed. Thanks for this great overview.
I listened to “Rough Sketches” on the way to work the other morning after hearing about his passing. Nice way to pass some time. Go John, go.
When I first heard the news of his passing I thought they meant Jon Stewart of The Daily Show!
I just heard the sad news & have shed a tear or two, he was without doubt the finest American singer/songwriter in my lifetime and will be sorely missed but what a legacy he has left in his wonderful songs. I will be having a drink to his memory tonight.
Truly an unfortunate passing. However, Jan. 18th 2008 was actually a Friday. Saturday was the 19th. Which day did he die? It would be appropriate in such a tribute to publish the correct day/date.
john stewart [bombs away dream babies]
‘we will find our golden road
somewhere down the line
if we don’t we all were sold
somewhere down the line
when we were young and it shined
now i believe it’s getting closer all the time
we will find our golden road
somewhere down the line.
…i will leave my worries go
somewhere down the line
live those dreams that we were sold
somewhere down the line
when I was young and it shined
now i believe it’s getting closer all the time
we will find our golden road
somewhere down the line’
-john stewart, rip
There have been so many beautiful memorials written for this great singer-songwriter. Sadly, he is getting much more attention now than during most of his living years. To those of us who followed John’s career from the beginning, it doesn’t seem possible that he is gone, but we count ourselves as very lucky to have had his music in our hearts all these years, and there it will remain.
I wanted to add to your retrospective of his work the wonderful 2006 album “The Day The River Sang”. The magic that had dimmed slightly in a few of his previous albums, along with his voice, returned in full for this great set of songs.
RIP John. You will never be forgotten.
Thanks for your very thoughtful memorial. I’m honored to be introduced to John Stewart through your writing, and will look forward to discovering his music.
always the friend. you really were a big part of our lives, and will continue to be..god bless
I was a fan of the Kingston Trio and noticed this ‘new guy’ John Stewart was writing lots of the songs on their albums. Later I heard the ‘California Bloodlines’ LP and I was hooked! I bought all of his albums after that. I met John many times whenever he toured the UK and took lots of photos of him onstage. He used to joke and say ‘I knew you’d be here tonight!’ He was a big part of my musical life and I’ll never forget him. Goodnight- Ol’ Lonesome Picker.
When I heard of his passing, I felt the bottom drop out of the day, and I went running to all the old LP’s for consolation. The strange thing was that there was really no one I could call to really share my grief or recognition of John’s significance. I talked to my friends, but few of them knew John’s work or understood what his passing might mean to me. The answer was right there in the grooves of my old dusty albums, but few people had ever heard them. Some of them remembered “Gold”, and of course the mention of “Daydream Believer” conjured up only images of Davy Jones and the Monkees. Few people knew the immensity and strength of his life’s work - and after reading this fine review, I now realize that I also had missed a great deal of it. Thank you so much for the heartfelt overview. As John wished, I found “some healing” in his songs.
Nice article Mr. Jurek. John Stewart was very talented and *way* underrated in my opinion. I sincerely hope more people become aware of his work that thankfully remains. What a loss.
RIP John.
I can not count the number of times I saw John perform live through the years and I have always been so perplexed that he was ignored by so many. Along with many other of his fans I spent years writing to Austin City Limits and other shows requesting he be given an appearance but never succeeded. And now this musical giant is gone but maybe his music can still find new appreciation. This man was special in so many ways and I feel such a loss knowing I will not be able to see once again.
I lost my dad to cancer August of 1978. I was 14 & had lost my only male role model. Next summer, I took a bus trip from San Antonio to San Diego to visit relatives. My best friend at the time was my FlavoRadio - as the frequencies came in & faded I couldn’t get enough of John’s “Gold.” As my collection of John’s records grew over the high school & college years, I internalized his messages: Love for my country, compassion for my brothers and sisters, respect for and love of humanity. I now have three sons of my own, the oldest in his early teens. I continue to instill these priceless messages to my boys.
I now realize John’s lyrics picked up where my father left off - they left me with the insight of what it truly takes to be a real man, a good husband and father.
Thank you, John. Heaven will have a new saint, I’ve lost another dad.
I was introduced to his music through “Bombs Away Dream Babies” an album I still regularly listen to, enjoy and introduce friends to. Thank you to the author of the article for such a great review of his work. I will be following up on a lot of the material you highlighted.
John Stewart, you borught a lot of joy and thought to a lot of people. Rest in peace. You’ve more than earned it.
Peter
It has been over a week now and still I am under a cloud of sadness over John Stewart’s passing. I have been a record producer for about thirty years and a writer performer longer than that. In my view John is one of the 10 greatest songwriters in american history. A great performer who always followed his heart and instinct (well nearly always) and was rewarded with relative obscurity. I have seen him perform literally countless times over the past 40 years or so and never failed to be swept away by his skill.
His guitar playing informed as it was by his early mastery of the banjo was unique and has been oft noted stood as the basis for Lindsey Buckingham’s early education as a player. He influenced many others yet remained stubbornly obscure. He could be a cantankerous and even occasionally prickly performer and was without doubt always in control on stage yet was such a genuine gentle man. His love of life and faith in people always betrayed his deep humanity. He was riotously funny and performed as if he had been born onstage.
The last few times I saw John it was stunning to see the effect time and struggle had had upon him. I never would have previously described him as fragile but in the last few years his performances were clearly more fatiguing for him. He still gave it everything he had but time had slowed him and I felt it might now be showing how hard it was to remain as obscure as he had when he knew how good he actually was. Any one who knew him knew just how great he was. I will miss him. I mourn that there will be no new songs. I will miss his humor on stage (and off). Thank god the 500 plus songs he wrote will last forever. And that his influence among writers will continue long into the future. 68 years was just not long enough for me. I hope it was for John.
I jumped into radio in 64, i played the kingston Trio hits, and played John Stewart’s Gold. I still play his song Gold on my internet radio station…love the song. This is a tragic loss. and i wish the best for his family.
Mr. Jurek: I have held your album reviews in high regard since I first discovered allmusicguide.com as a resource for the listening public, and your insightful and heartfelt commentary on the significance of John Stewart’s career and body of music only deepens that respect. Thank you. I was in a folk quartet in high school in ‘65-66 modeled after the Second Trio and John was our inspirational muse. His solo work since those days stands on a plane of its own, as you aptly observe. John’s plaintive, world-weary rendition of “Lucky Old Sun” on Havana, which put even the Frankie Laine and Ray Charles versions in their place, provided an incredibly expressive coda to a long and unparalleled career. I just can’t quite grasp that it’s over. –Alan Holman, Austin, Texas
“Hand your heart to the wind, let it carry you home…”
Such a lyrical voice will never be silenced. What a talented man.
Hand your heart to the wind, let it carry you home…
Such a lyrical voice will never be silenced. What a talented man.
I saw John a number of times in the 90s/00s at the Tin Angel, a second-story folk club in Old Philadlephia. 100 seats or so. Great setting to see a folk legend. My buddy and I had a couple of encounters with John. Our (somewhat) drunken enthusiasm apparently annoyed him one night in particular, as he sent Dave Batti in between shows to cool it down a bit. I confess that I grabbed (stole) a copy of some of his handwritten lyrics from a music stand at the end of the second show. Sadly, I tore them up later that night when I got in a funk and thought John was something of a blowhard. I sure wish I had them now. Fortunaely, I do have a candid photo of myself with John taken after a show in 1996 or 97. He’s been on my playlist for the last 15 years, and, especially in the past week. Anybody whose got 50 or so genuinely good/great songs in his cannon when all is said and done has to be judged as one hell of a talent. And he was. RIP J.W.
For those of us who knew him , we can never say enough. For those who did not, we can never say enough. “Turn us all to stars, thoughout the Milky Way, truly we will make the night as bright as bright as day” That, he did. God’s speed, John.
I have lived in Australia most of my life and for much of it John Stewart was the soundtrack as I surfed the wild, far-flung beaches of our southern states before settling in big city Sydney. His sense of time and place and use of natural imagery - fire, wind, water, rain, sky and sun - seemed to fit with the places I loved as much as the American setting he wrote about. There were true classics - California Bloodlines, Lonesome Picker Rides Again, the double live and, later, Punch The Big Guy. In truthfulness, the recording quality dropped away later on, but not the song quality, and nothing can diminish his legacy. With Dylan, he was the foundation stone of the singer-songwriter movement. This is just to let you know he had and still has his true believers on the far side of the big blue Pacific.
My late brother, David, introduced me to John Stewart’s music. David learned to play guitar listening to Kingston Trio records back in the early 1960’s. Later on, 1969, I think, he bought Stewart’s first solo album, “Signals Thru The Glass”. When he played it for me I was amazed. What an entrancing album that was - After that I bought his albums up through “Fire In The Wind” and then I sort of lost track. Only by chance did I discover that “Signals” was finally being made available on CD a few years back. I saw John at McCabe’s back in July, 2006 and I remember that he seemed to be struggling physically, although in the 2nd half of the show he seemed to pick up some strength for a while. I remembered wondering if I would ever see him perform again. I had hoped to see him at McCabe’s this Feb 2nd, but found I had to work and that same thought crossed my mind again. Little did I know that John had already passed at that time, I just hadn’t heard the news yet.
Yes, he will be missed. At least we have the wonderful legacy of his music to remind us of this truly great artist.
The Kingston Trio revived my interest in music. When I heard “Greenback Dollar” I asked my parents for a guitar and they helped me tune it to the LP so I could learn TKT songs; the first being that 3-cord gem!!! I then proceeded to buy all of their albums, then learning how great JS was as he brought a new sound and more contemporary sound to the group. In college I formed a trio (”RonBillRick Trio” and “The Starewell Engagement”) and we did mostly TKT songs from the Stewart Era, including Chilly Winds, Those Who Are Wise, Road to Freedom, RUn The Ridges, Children of the Morning, New Frontier, One More Town, Spinnin’ of the World, and on… With the change of the ’60’s, I followed JS as a solo artist and learned many of his great songs, from California Bloodlines, July,You’re A Woman, All American Girl, you Can’t Look Back, Never Goin’ Back, Little Road & A Stone To Roll, Daydream Believer, Light Come Shine, All Time Woman, Armstrong, Wheatfield Lady, Hung on the Heart, Wingless Angels, Fire in the Wind, The Wild SIde of You, GOld, Lost Her in the Sun, Jenny Was A Dream Girl, Bringing Down the Moon, Kansas, Dreamers On The Rise, Stand By The Children, Botswana, Runaway Train, Seven Angels, Irresitable Targets, Hunters of the Sun, Strange Rivers, The River, All The Words…and on…and on…
He will be truly missed, by me and other Bloodliners who feel the chilly winds but are warmed by so much wisdom and insight to what makes America and us great!!! RIP John, God Bless and long may you memory and your gifts be carried forward!!!
Bill
I loved the music of the Kingston Trio, and John’s work. I saw him perform at the Town Crier Cafe in Pauling, New York in 1994. I was blown away with his songs and his performance. I only found about his death last week. I did not read the newspapers at the time of his passing. I am deeply saddened.