Country music over the years has produced many songs about country music. I’m not talking about the wife leaving, the train leaving, the dog dying, the trucks, the binges that Steve Goodman documented in “You Never Called Me By My Name,” but songs about the country music industry itself and its colorful cast of characters.
Sometimes these songs could be funny, but just as often they were self-contained and mythologized. But “16th Avenue” by songwriter Tom Shyler – especially as performed by Lacyj Dalton in 1982 – was best-in-class among country songs about country music.
Shyler thought he wrote one of those closed-ended songs. “It was actually about one subject,” he says. “My friends on Music Row who wrote the songs. It wasn’t about steelworkers or teachers. It was about guys who wrote songs.”
But Shyler’s song was put together in a way that could resonate with any listener who left home with hopes and dreams of a better life. It was a song about aspirations and the uncertainty that comes after they are realized.
Dalton’s own story in some ways echoes the narrative of “16th Avenue.” She was not born with that national name. Her parents named her Jill Byrem when she arrived in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1946.
Shyler, coincidentally, was also from Pennsylvania.
Dalton/Byrem fell in love with country music early on, but also felt the pull of folk, rock and protest music in the 1960s when she began singing as Jill Croston. The great Nashville producer Billy Sherrill heard demos of her country music singing, and in 1979 she was reinvented as Lacyj Dalton, a country singer with a voice that was both steely in its power and fluid in its vulnerable vibrato, following the tradition laid down by some of the genre’s great singers: Lefty Frizzell and George Jones.
The window for Dalton as a Nashville hitmaker has been open for just over a decade, beginning in 1979 with “Crazy Blue Eyes,” the first of more than 20 chart-topping hits. She offered indelible versions of songs written by others and showed she had a talent for melodies and lyrics in songs like “Everybody Makes Mistakes.”
Country music has changed over the years, and as she moved closer to pop music, she leaned more toward folk. In conversation, she mentions Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Guy Clark and other songwriters before she became a singer.
She also cites another Dalton, the great, largely forgotten ’60s folk singer Karen Dalton, as a reference point. “She was a huge influence on my singing,” Dalton says. “I like people who have incredible phrasing. Her, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald. But I lived with Karen for a while. She taught me a lot. She told me, ‘Lacey, don’t sing the song. Talk to him. … ‘”
Dalton sings-sings a few lines over the phone in that unmistakable voice.
There was something alive in Karen Dalton’s music. The native of Bonham, Texas, made two influential recordings between 1969 and 1971 before disappearing into obscurity. After years of struggling with depression and addiction, she died of complications from AIDS in 1993. Her posthumous fame far exceeds all the attention she received during her lifetime.
Since then, Dalton has continued to exist at the crossroads of old country, soul and folk. “Americana, I think you’d call it,” she says. “It’s a little bit folksy, no big deal to the ears.”
She has kept some distance between herself and Nashville, settling in Nevada, where she runs the Let ’em Run Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting wild horses in the West.
She continued recording, recording an album of songs by Hank Williams and The Last Wild Place, which includes new songs as well as some of her old favorites, re-recorded with a more folksy bent.
Frizzell appears several times in the conversation.
“There are always shifts in music, and I think they’re good,” she says. “They make growth spurt from the edges, which wouldn’t be the case otherwise. But I’m also a purist in that I love Appalachian music, like Jean Ritchie. I like Leadbelly, and I think Lefty is a guy who was also a purist. Music is a spiritual medium, a sacred medium. There’s a fine line between sweet and too sweet. But I always thought good was good. And you just know it. I don’t give a (swear word) what it is, if it’s a true feeling, you can listen to it. I don’t care what you call it. That’s what I was trying to do. To compose good music.”