Cover Lay Down

Pierce Pettis‘ 1989 sophomore release While The Serpent Lies Sleeping was the first solo folk album I bought with my own money; I still have the vinyl put away somewhere, waiting for the day the tinnitus fades, and I can appreciate the fidelity. I bought it because of the power of a single song, the title track to Legacy: A Collection of New Folk Music, a Windham Hill collection of up and coming singer songwriters which would also lead me to John Gorka, Bill Morrissey, Cliff Eberhardt, and David Massengill, all of whom were featured in some way or another in my father’s record collection, while Pettis was not.

[Incidentally, Legacy also contained a lovely, delicate harp-and-guitar cover of Prince's When U Were Mine by a female duo called the Blue Rubies, which I continue to look for in some digital form. Funny how so much of one's future as an audiophile can be traced to one defining album. But I digress.]

While The Serpent Lies Sleeping wasn’t perfect — looking back, it is clear that the production doesn’t really fit what Wikipedia aptly describes as Pettis’ “introspective and introverted lyrics” — but it was a revelation all the same. Up until then, I had thought of modern folk music as something sparse involving a songwriter and a guitar; this was something else. Pettis may have defined himself as folk, having grown up as a member of the Fast Folk crowd along with so many artists we’ve featured here at Cover Lay Down, but with the exception of that hauntingly beautiful selection from the Windham Hill sampler, the production on the album was decidedly folk-rock, upbeat and drum-heavy.

I listened to the album for weeks, but I had just started a new high school, and soon, my head was filled with new sounds: hip-hop, grunge, and alt-rock. Other than my early infatuation with the folk rock of the Indigo Girls, my brief experiment with Pierce Pettis was one of the only times I would make that close a connection to folk on my own terms, without my father’s influence, until I started attending folk festivals as an adult a decade later.


Two decades later, though I had come back to folk music, I’d kind of lost track of Pierce Pettis. Some of this was due to my own provincialism: unlike ubiquitous touring machine John Gorka, who seemed to show at every folk festival I attended, the Alabama-based Pettis doesn’t hit the northeast festival circuit that much. But some of it was due to the misimpression of his style left by that single album — one which I was still lugging around in a box every time we moved, but which I no longer listened to all the way through.

I had gone away assuming that Pettis was a folk rocker, struggling to be heard against his own production. But in the intervening years, Pettis had pulled away from the harder edge of folk rock and, with the assistance of his friend and next-round producer, fellow singer-songwriter Mark Heard, redefined his sound around a more straightforward folk model without losing the potency of his lyrics, or withdrawing from his instantly recognizable acoustic-roots style. I just didn’t know.

Which is why I’m especially grateful that last week my friends at Compass Records sent along That Kind of Love, the new album from Pierce Pettis. Because while having missed so much of his career — an error I am rapidly addressing, I swear — I cannot speak to whether this album is a homecoming for Pettis himself, I can say it makes an excellent homecoming for this listener. And I suspect it provides an equally strong introduction for those that might need one.


From a here-and-now perspective, That Kind of Love is a success on many levels. It brings me back to an artist with a sense of lyricism that I’d forgotten, helping me see why so many singer-songwriters celebrate Pettis as a songwriter first, and why so many of his peers, from Joan Baez to Garth Brooks to Dar Williams, have chosen to add his songs to their popular repertoires. It has a full and diverse sound, highly produced and tinged with americana and blues, that fits squarely in the pantheon of modern roots-folk classics, making it an enjoyable listen from start to finish. And, notably, it contains three very strong cover songs which provide access into the world of Pierce Pettis as a nuanced emotional interpreter of lyrics.

Pettis has covered a Mark Heard song on every one of his albums since Heard’s untimely passage in 1992, and this one is no exception, leading off with an upbeat take on Nothing But The Wind which sounds of a piece with the work Pettis was doing way back when I first discovered him. There’s an appropriately dusty americana-tinged fiddlefolk cover of Guthrie’s Pastures of Plenty here, too, which is well worth the purchase. But it’s the Jesse Winchester cover, of a song which I first heard via Chris Smither, which is the true cover gem on the album. Where Smither made the song his own by running it through the frantic foot-stomping fast-train guitarfolk blues he favors, Pettis sends the song south, playing it languid and bluesy and warm, filling up the smoky room with bass, organ, harmonica, and full drum kit. You’d be forgiven for thinking this was Bruce Cockburn at his best.

I can’t justify sharing all three covers, of course; the point here is to generate interest in the album, not undermine it. So how ’bout if I bring you to Pettis through the Winchester and Guthrie covers, plus a live Dylan cover of unknown age and origin, and an older live take on one of my favorite Heard songs, and in return, you pick up your own copy of That Kind of Love, learn to love Pettis for himself, and then let him continue to bring you in to the songwriting of his own peer and friend Mark Heard the way he has always wanted to? Here’s the goods to get you started on the journey:

• Pierce Pettis: Talk Memphis (orig. Jesse Winchester)
• Pierce Pettis: Pastures of Plenty (orig. Woody Guthrie)
  (from That Kind of Love, 2009)

• Pierce Pettis: Down in the Flood (orig. Bob Dylan)
  (live; from Pierce Pettis’ press kit)

• Pierce Pettis and Friends: Nod Over Coffee (orig. Mark Heard)
  (from Big Times In A Small Town - The Vineyard Tapes, 1993)

Today’s Bonus Coverfolk Tracks mostly feature a few other artists’ takes on Pierce Pettis tunes, from the sparse acoustic folk of singer-songwriter Don Conoscenti to the now-defunct Front Porch String Band’s proto-bluegrass to the gentle lullaby folk of Mae Robertson, who we featured way back in April of last year, and who my kids enjoy so much. Dar Williams’ cover of Family, which most folks think is an original, is so tender and sad and celebratory all at once it never fails to makes me cry. And just for comparison’s sake, I’ve tacked that Chris Smither cover of Jesse Winchester’s Talk Memphis on the end of the list. Enjoy.

• Dar Williams: Family (orig. Pierce Pettis)
• Don Conoscenti: Just Like Jim Brown (ibid.)
• Front Porch String Band f. Claire Lynch: Natchez Trace (ibid.)
• Mae Robertson: Great Big World (ibid.)

• Chris Smither: Talk Memphis (orig. Jesse Winchester)

PS: On a totally unrelated note, thanks to those who continue to send suggestions for managing my ongoing struggle with tinnitus. For those interested in learning more about this increasingly common ailment, this week’s issue of The New Yorker has an excellent article on the subject by doctor and fellow tinnitus sufferer Jerome Groopman.