Whatever happened to Larry Jon Wilson?

By Joel Oliphint

In 1975, a documentary filmmaker shot footage for what eventually became Heartworn Highways, a cult classic about country musicians who didn’t quite fit into the Nashville mold—folks like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, big names in the “outlaw country” movement that was just taking hold.

In one of the film’s opening scenes, a bearded, broad-shouldered musician in a Western shirt sits down with his guitar in a big Nashville studio and teaches his band how to play “Ohoopee River Bottomland,” a swampy, country-funk number about “a Georgia gator hole,” he says. He rhythmically slaps his guitar strings while singing in a strikingly smooth, Southern baritone. His talent jumps off the screen.

That man is Larry Jon Wilson, a name that, for most, doesn’t rank among the outlaw pantheon. By the time Heartworn Highways was released in 1981, Wilson had already begun to fade into obscurity. 

But Jerry DeCicca, the singer/guitarist for Columbus band the Black Swans and a walking encyclopedia of American roots music, isn’t among those “most.” He and his UK musician/producer friend Jeb Loy Nichols were awestruck by that Heartworn Highways performance. They wanted to hear more. They managed to track down all four of Wilson’s old vinyl albums from the 1970s and were no less impressed.

Ultimately, the burning question in their minds was, “Whatever happened to Larry Jon Wilson?”

And then they set out to find the answer to that question.

Slipping through the cracks

Wilson, 68, calls himself a bullshitter. More accurately, he’s a storyteller, one who doesn’t take much prompting.

“I never learned nothin’ from a quiet man,” he says. In the course of a phone conversation, as he grills some rib-eye steaks in his hometown of Augusta, Ga., Wilson opines on everything from Greenwich Village coffeehouses and Akron’s Soap Box Derby to his friend Billy Joe Shaver, whom he calls “the best country-western writer ever.”

Wilson has called many musicians “friend” over the years, though he’s not one to name-drop. He ran with the likes of Waylon Jennings and a young Steve Earle, shared a farmhouse with his friend and touring mate Townes Van Zandt and considered legendary songwriter Mickey Newbury one of his best friends.

Wilson started his own musical journey later in life than most; he didn’t even own a guitar until UPS delivered one on his 30th birthday—the same day his father died, and the same day his wife found out she was pregnant with their first child. Needless to say, that 12-string Martin is not for sale. 

“It’s like a talisman of that unusual weekend,” he says.

Just a few years later, Wilson made a demo tape. Monument Records—then one of the largest independent record companies in Nashville—liked what they heard and gave him a record deal. He recorded his first album, 1975’s  New Beginnings, before ever meeting Monument’s now-legendary label boss Fred Foster.

But the transition to Music City wasn’t an easy one. Back in Georgia, he had a wife, three kids, a place in the suburbs and a good-paying job doing chemical research and development on polymers. He was good at it, and he enjoyed it. In most people’s eyes, he already had the good life.

“The choice I made was to give up the life of accumulating and calling it success, and to begin a life of creating and calling that success,” Wilson says.

Wilson would release four albums in four years on Monument, and even with the heavy-handed production that was common at the time, much of the material holds up well today—a singular sound that mixes country, funk, soul and pop. 

“I liked his voice, and I liked his sense of detail,” says the Black Swans’ DeCicca. “I liked the fact that, lyrically, it’s really colorful stuff. There’s a sense of geography. You definitely feel like you’re in the South.”

“What also struck me is that it’s not macho,” he says. “It sounds rugged, but it’s really sentimental.”

DeCicca likes to say that Wilson is the only person he’s ever heard who actually sings with a Georgia accent. Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer John Prine, a longtime Wilson fan, is similarly enamored with his singing. 

“Larry Jon’s voice is one of the sweetest instruments I’ve ever heard,” Prine said via e-mail. 

The problem was, no one quite knew how to market that unique sound. On the song “Throw My Hands Up,” Wilson laments, “Music City’s tryin’ to break me/They never knew how to take me.”

His refusal to conform didn’t further his career, either. He did things his own way, and he liked the fact that when he started out, he had a back-door key at Monument and could talk to Fred Foster whenever he felt like it. But things didn’t stay that way. Record companies like Monument began to be swallowed up by big, international conglomerates.

“I just didn’t want to be even a small contributing part to some company that has more people in its legal department than we had on our entire label,” he says.

“Larry Jon’s got a really good bullshit detector. He doesn’t want to deal with a bunch of suits,” DeCicca says. “Nobody wants to work with somebody who isn’t gonna play the game.”

Wilson never cared much about being famous, either. He had a first-hand view of fame, and wasn’t impressed by its effect. “It’s a sad thing when stardom ruins people’s motivation. I’ve never had that problem. I cannot be yesterday’s papers, because I was never today’s papers,” he says, laughing. “So there’s an upside to that.” 

“But if I need a new engine in my car, I have to go do some distasteful gigs to get the money,” he says. “That’s one of the downsides.”

Wilson and Nashville soon parted ways. He wandered for a time around Florida Gulf towns and eventually settled back in Georgia. His marriage ended after 20 years. In addition to playing those occasional gigs, he has found work doing voiceovers and hosting a regional television program. He still opts for the newspaper over a computer or TV, and while he keeps in touch with some of his songwriter friends, many, like Van Zandt and Newbury, have passed away.

“There’s a lot of people that I think slipped through the cracks,” DeCicca says, “and he’s somebody that did.”

Lost and found

It didn’t take any great detective work to find Larry Jon Wilson. He’d continued gigging off and on in beer halls and whiskey bars in and around his Georgia home for years.

Jeb Loy Nichols, who makes his home in the UK, is a respected record producer there. Through contacts in the business, Nichols was able to reach Wilson. He had one question: “Could we get you to record again?”

Wilson was interested. Knowing his appreciation of Wilson’s music, Nichols brought his friend, DeCicca, into the picture and they began talking to Wilson about recording some new material.

“Larry Jon was open to the idea,” DeCicca says, “but it took a long time and a lot of different labels to come around.”

Eventually Nichols convinced Sony’s 1965 Records in the UK to put up money to record and release a new album. Nichols hired DeCicca to co-produce, DeCicca hired his friend Jake Housh of Columbus band Moviola to engineer, and in 2007 they rented a Ford Taurus and headed down to Perdido Key, Fla., one of Wilson’s old haunts, in hopes of recapturing the forgotten troubadour on record.

Perdido Key is a postcard-worthy barrier island that lies along the border of Florida and Alabama. The island’s beach community is home to spots like the Flora-Bama, a bar famous for its musical history (the Allman Brothers, John Prine and others have played there), its annual mullet-tossing contest and the Bushwacker, the bar’s best-known drink.

Perdido (“Lost” in Spanish) Key is also home to a condo complex called the Mirabella, where one of Wilson’s old friends offered up a picturesque 15th-floor suite overlooking the Gulf of Mexico as the makeshift studio setting for Larry Jon Wilson’s first album in almost 30 years.

It was a beautiful setting—for dinner and a drink. For recording, it was a bit unorthodox. And the recording process itself presented challenges.

Housh, who has recorded all of Moviola’s albums, was skeptical from the beginning. He didn’t think it would happen, even though it seemed like a great idea. “Record-type stuff notoriously falls through,” he says. “That someone would pay for us to go to Florida and do it sounded far-fetched.”

Much to his surprise, it was real, so Housh dropped everything and left. But when they arrived, something was missing. 

“The first two days, (Larry Jon) wasn’t there,” Housh says. “We just holed up in a motel on the Florida-Alabama border for two days waiting for Larry Jon to arrive. I was about to wring Jerry’s neck.”

Wilson eventually arrived, his ruddy, craggy face still boasting that beard, albeit a much whiter one. Barrel-chested, his T-shirts and polos hang loose around a paunch common to men in their late 60s.

Unbeknownst to the production team, Wilson had a gig scheduled the day he arrived—his first of four over the next 10 days.

“They thought it was hilarious that the first day nothing happened,” says Housh, a family man who laughs now, but didn’t find it so funny then. “I was just like, ‘Guys, we can’t be down here dickin’ around.’”

Wilson, who was staying elsewhere in Perdido, sometimes showed up at the condo at 3 p.m., sometimes 10 p.m. There was no schedule, and even with the microphones set up and the computer recording, no one ever quite knew when a story would turn into a song, or even what song Wilson would play, much less if he intended to stay put. Housh eventually rearranged the condo’s pastel, flowered couches in an attempt to trap him behind the microphone. 

Wilson explains the lackadaisical mood in Perdido Key in his charmingly aloof way: “I didn’t know we were doing an album,” he says. “We were just having a pretty nice time, and it became an album.”

There’s no disputing the good time, drinking Bushwackers at the Flora-Bama, eating at Triggers—a seafood restaurant with fresh grouper and fried cheesecake—and watching Wilson perform at hillbilly bars. He seemed to know somebody everywhere they went.

And despite—or, perhaps more accurately, because of—the carefree atmosphere, the album came out beautifully. Wilson’s deep, worn voice reverberates off the floor-to-ceiling windows and marble beneath his feet, and his rhythmic, funky guitar style has been supplanted by deft finger-picking that’s no less impressive and even more fitting to these songs, some of which are covers (Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson’s “Heartland,” Dave Loggins’s “Goodbye Eyes”). To capture the spontaneity of Wilson’s performances, DeCicca left in bits of Wilson’s banter before or after the songs.

“We wanted to do something that represented what Larry Jon does now,” DeCicca says. “We didn’t want it to be trendy.”

It’s an intimate record. You can hear Wilson’s inhales and exhales, the creak of his guitar. You’ll also hear some subtle fiddle, courtesy of Noel Sayre, the former Black Swans violinist who died in a swimming pool accident last summer. (Housh recorded Sayre’s parts separately at Used Kids Records.)

Most astounding is that all but one song on the record were first and only takes. Nichols and DeCicca, whom Housh calls two of the biggest music geeks he knows, would chat with Wilson about little-known singer-songwriters, alternate versions of songs and the like, and those conversations would spark songs—a result that DeCicca says wasn’t an accident.

“He saw my Paul Siebel CD,” DeCicca says, “and he goes, ‘Do you know Paul Siebel? I used to do his song about the whore.…’” Housh quickly hit “Record,” and that Siebel cover turned into an epic, three-song medley called “Whore Trilogy,” one of the album’s highlights.

“There was a point where we weren’t sure we were going to have enough for a record,” DeCicca says. “In the end, we did.”

Outlasting them all

The resulting album came out last year in the UK, and Tuesday will see its U.S. release on Drag City, home to artists such as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Bill Callahan and the Silver Jews. Housh still can’t believe it, and DeCicca is overwhelmed by it all, too, going from a Larry Jon Wilson fan to a Larry Jon Wilson producer, all within a couple of years.

It’s probably not a rags-to-riches story, though. While Wilson is certainly getting more exposure to a new audience (he played a show with Steve Earle last weekend), it’s doubtful this album will bring him fame on the level of some of his contemporaries. And that’s just the way he likes it. 

“I have singer-songwriter friends who went on to different things, and certainly, almost without exception, to what the world considers success,” Wilson says. “They probably feel bad for me, but they don’t realize I feel bad for them.… When I get around friends my age, it seems to have had more of a toll on them. I think it’s just because they may not have been as happy as I’ve been. They’re not as poor, either.”          

“I’m enjoying playing more than I ever have, and I feel like I’m doing it well,” he says. “If you can’t beat the bastards, then the best thing to do is outlast them.”