heartworn highways

... has been hailed by critics as a spot-on documentary on some of the key figures of the mid-70s Nashville Country Outlaw movement. It features a number of young talents who had just started out in Music City, singing the songs they themselves had written: Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Steve Earl, Rodney Crowell, John Hiatt, David Allan Coe - and Larry Jon Wilson.

Larry Jon re-recorded Ohoopee River Bottomland from his first Monument LP for the movie after a very short night. Taken from the liner notes by Philip Schopper from the re-issue on Hachtone Records:

Ohoopee River Bottomland/That's a Lightnin' (Hopkins) Lick

"Jim and Graham were in love with the deep, corrugated voice of Larry Jon Wilson. Knowing it would be at its deepest in the morning, Jim wanted to record the session as early as possible, before Larry Jon had much of a chance to use his voice at all. He wanted it deep and rusty with unuse. The session turned into a bit of a lesson in "be careful what you wish for".

... This song was the first thing we were going to shoot for the movie, which Jim had been envisioning for months, and we worked like late-season beavers lighting and setting up for the arrival of Larry Jon Wilson. Then we waited. And we waited. After an hour of standing around in the bitter cold ... finally Graham jumped in a car and went to the motel in which Larry Jon was staying and, quite literally, dragged him out of bed. The night before, it turned out, Larry Jon had a gig that rolled happily into a party, which ended some fuzzy moments before dawn. Going to work in a studio was not his idea of post-party fun. But Graham cajoled and implored, and Jim got his wish. Larry Jon came to the studio having said nothing much more all morning than "What? Now?" and "Yeah, yeah, I'm coming". Somehow, the whole thing just worked - his performance was amazing and now we felt like we just might be on to something great after all."

Filmed from Dec 22nd, 1975 to Jan 14, 1976, the movie wasn't released until 1981. By that time some of the talents had broken into the music business, while others struggled. Larry Jon's recording carreer had come to a stand-still after the release of Sojourner, his last Monument LP.