A good place to begin remembering the life of Guy Clark, the singer and songwriter, who died on Tuesday, at the age of seventy-four, is "Heartworn Highways," a documentary directed by James Szalapski that featured many of the musicians from what was known as the outlaw-country movement of the nineteen-seventies, including Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Young, Rodney Crowell, and Steve Earle. In the film, which was shot in 1975 and 1976, Clark performs a few of his songs, including "That Old Time Feeling" and "L.A. Freeway," both of which had, a few years earlier, been covered by his friend Jerry Jeff Walker. But what comes through most in the documentary is Clark’s presence; he is tall and strikingly handsome, with fearsome brows, a great mane of brown hair, and slightly busted front teeth. He wears a blue denim work shirt, which would become his signature look for about the next half century, and a silver-and-turquoise ring on his right hand. In the middle of the film, there is an extended scene of Clark, a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, at work repairing a guitar, filing small pieces of bone for the nut and bridge while discussing the particulars of wood glue. The camera zooms in on his hands—big and strong, nicked up a little, and with fine, short nails. They have the plain look of what they were, a builder's hands. Clark worked on guitars and wrote songs. Both were cut and crafted, made for the long run.
The year 1975 also marked the release of Clark's first album, "Old No. 1.” If that had been his only recording, if he had knocked off soon after, he still would have left behind enough classics to keep a few subsequent generations of admirers and cover artists busy. His recording of "L.A. Freeway," stripped of the studio flourishes of Walker's cover, is the essential version of a great American song. "Like a Coat from the Cold" is a love ballad full of gorgeous sentiment that stops short of being sentimental, something Clark almost always managed to pull off. "She Ain't Going Nowhere," with an angelic Emmylou Harris harmonizing on the chorus, and "Desperados Waiting for a Train" are twin emotional epics. "Texas 1947" and "Instant Coffee Blues" are tight short stories. "Let Him Roll" is the other-side-of-the-tracks Nashville cousin of the George Jones funeral weeper "He Stopped Loving Her Today." The album has unity without being an actual cycle of songs, tied together by Clark's deft guitar-picking, unfussy voice, and good-natured wisdom.
But Clark didn't knock off, of course, and kept making gems for the next forty years: "Anyhow, I Love You," "The Last Gunfighter Ballad," "Old Friends," "Magnolia Wind," "Step Inside This House," "Dublin Blues," and "The Randall Knife," a haunting spoken-word elegy to his father. He wrote a few hits, mostly for other people, and won a handful of Grammy awards. He never got rich, but earned the admiration of countless songwriters, including Bob Dylan. It's tough to pin down precisely what made his songs so distinctive. He wasn't a poet genius like Townes Van Zandt, or a blazing, righteous performer like Steve Earle. He never enjoyed wide popularity like Willie Nelson or Waylon Jennings. Mostly his songs were strong and steady, projecting a deep, indisputable, and ultimately persuasive confidence and sense of self. He sounded about the same age in 1975 that he did in 2014, save for some weathering of the voice. And the songs were most perfect at the level of the line, embodying the terse and clever brilliance that exists in the best country music. There's the opener to "She Ain't Going Nowhere": "Standin' on the gone side of leavin', she found a thumb and stuck it in the breeze." Or the final lines of "Let Him Roll": "He always said that heaven was just a Dallas whore."
Clark was born in West Texas, and his music is strongly associated with his home state, but he made most of it in Nashville, where he moved with his wife, Susanna, a painter and songwriter in her own right, in the early nineteen-seventies. By the time of the filming of "Heartworn Highways," their house had become a salon for established and aspiring musicians: both Guy and Susanna were considered mentors to other artists. Maybe it was the fact that they were a married couple, and could manage to keep a house while so many in their set were drifting, but they were said to have taken on something of a parental role, even for their peers. There's a photograph of the two of them around that time, standing side by side in front of a VW truck, she in a print dress, he in his denim, that makes for a kind of country-music "American Gothic." (That picture is the cover of a great two-disk tribute album to Clark, "This One's for Him," from 2011.) Judged alongside their close friend Van Zandt, who was plagued by mental illness and addiction, the Clarks could be seen as sober and stable counterweights. "There was a certain part of my life that Townes admired, figure it was mostly Susanna," Guy said, in "Be Here to Love Me," a documentary about Van Zandt. "They had shit between them that was never between Townes and anybody, or Susanna and anybody, including me." He adds, "I hope it wasn't sexual," before breaking off in a cackle.
But Guy and Susanna's stability was only a matter of degree. As John Spong writes in an essential profile of Clark, published in Texas Monthly, in 2014, those were wild years, for all of them, and in the years that followed Guy kept up his share of drinking, drug use, gambling, and cheating, to the point that, in the late eighties, Susanna moved out for four years. They eventually reunited, but the final years of their marriage were hard, as Susanna medicated her debilitating back problems with pain pills that left her mostly in bed. She died of a heart attack, in 2012. Guy's own body came apart in his final years. Spong tallies up the carnage: three lost toes to diabetes, two knee replacements, cataract surgery on both eyes, chemo to treat lymphoma. Still, despite the rough patches and, later, the ravages that befell them both, the marriage of Guy and Susanna was one of the great romances of American music, and it's captured for history in much of Clark's music, including what was his last great song, "My Favorite Picture of You," which he played for his wife at the end of her life, and which was released on what would become his final album, in 2013.
Clark leaves behind a healthy armful of sombre ballads to mourn him by, including "Let Him Roll" and "The Randall Knife." But it's his other side that might provide greater comfort, his laid-back songs that celebrated simple daily pleasures—coffee and cigarettes and Texas cooking and, sometime later in the day, a good strong drink. He sang about these things in "Stuff That Works," written with Rodney Crowell, from 1995. It's a celebration of the way that familiar shirts, a trusty guitar, comfortable boots, and an old car that still runs all add up to something more: "Stuff that works, stuff that holds up / The kind of stuff you don't hang on the wall. / Stuff that's real, stuff you feel / The kind of stuff you reach for when you fall."
You can see such things, and feel the glow of such a life, in the final scene of "Heartworn Highways," as a group of musicians is assembled at the Clarks' house on Christmas Eve, 1975. They're sitting around a holiday table laden with oil-burning lamps, jugs of wine, cans of Pabst and Miller Lite, bottles of Wild Turkey, and packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes, holding guitars or else closing their eyes to sing. Steve Earle, just a kid, soars through a new one of his, while Clark joins him, stumbling a bit but enthusiastic, on the chorus. It looks warm and comfortable there in the lamplight, like the inside of a Guy Clark song.