Singer-Songwriter Rodney Crowell

Rodney Crowell in the NPR studio (Photos: Jamila Bey ©2001 NPR Online)

"My father had a perfectly good drummer who he had an argument with. So one day, on a Tuesday, my father came in with a cheap pawn shop set of drums and said, 'put your foot here and you kick there and you play this, and this is the high hat.' And Friday night I was playing in a honky-tonk."

And that was how singer-songwriter-producer Rodney Crowell got his start in the music business.

Crowell was 11. He would go on to produce albums for country music luminaries such as Emmylou Harris, Bob Seger, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, and make several of his own albums.

Morning Edition host Bob Edwards with Rodney Crowell

His latest is called The Houston Kid. "This record is sort of an autobiography of the environment I grew up in," says Crowell, who financed the album out of his own checkbook.

Besides his father, Crowell's other major music influence was the Man in Black, Johnny Cash. (Cash also became his father-in-law for several years, during the time he was married to singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash.) Crowell still remembers the first time he heard Cash's signature tune, I Walk the Line. Recalls Crowell, "it was as if that song reached out of the radio and grabbed my collar and said 'c'mere you!'"

Several years afterward, Crowell decided to revisit the song. He had remained close to Cash since divorcing Rosanne and he invited his former father-in-law to sing the chorus on Crowell's rendition of I Walk the Line. Cash listened as Crowell played the song for him in the studio. His response? "Son, you got a lot of nerve changing my melody."

Cash wasn't the only one to weigh in on his work. Crowell told Morning Edition host Bob Edwards that he had a dream in which his deceased parents gave him their critique. "They said they liked the album but they didn't think I'd told the entire story." Crowell, who admitted to not being 100 percent satisfied himself, picked up his guitar and, in the space of a half-hour, wrote a new introductory track about his family.

The story, he now felt, was finally complete. Listen as Morning Edition host Bob Edwards speaks with Crowell.

For more information on Rodney Crowell, go to:
www.rodneycrowell.net


Johnny Cash's I Walk The Line was part of the NPR 100. Click here to listen to the audio from that story.