Country Artist Spotlight: Jamey Johnson
The man who got me going down this musical road.
The voice that started me on the journey into modern outlaw country belongs to Jamey Johnson. It’s simply haunting and powerful. It gives his outlaw songs a rugged authority and makes his sad songs utterly heartbreaking.
He had some relatively early commercial success with his second major album, That Lonesome Song, and the award-winning single, In Color.
As a recently returned Iraq veteran, the verse about the protagonist’s service in WWII was poignant, but what really got me was this verse:
If it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just tryna save each other
You should’ve seen it in color
A picture’s worth a thousand words
But you can’t see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should’ve seen it in color
It’s a line that struck me because it means you should have seen it in person; you should have seen it live because whatever you see in pictures is curated.
It’s a moment where we put on a smile and hide everything that’s going on. So you’ll never understand what it was like if you didn’t see it in color.
Unfortunately for Johnson, and the rest of us fans, In Color, is his only song that found major commercial success. It may be because while the song is good, it’s a bit of an outlier for Johnson.
What I mean by that is that it’s very traditional in its structure and is still a feel-good song. It tells a story of hard times, but in a vague way, it all worked out in the end. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, happy ending. I’ll certainly sit and listen to it when it comes on, but it’s far from representative of Johnson’s style and feels like a bit of an oddball compared to the rest of the album.
His voice and throwback sad songs are far from pop country’s hip-hop crossover songs about lite beer and bikinis. His songs make you feel. They’re about pain, heartbreaks, and haunting mistakes.
Which is fantastic for serious fans but not a recipe for getting on the radio.
The title track of That Lonesome Song is absolutely in my top five or ten favorite all-time songs. A list that I have never actually compiled or written down, but I am confident this song, with fantastic verses like this would be on it:
What the hell did I do last night
That’s the story of my life
Like tryin’ to remember words
To a song nobody wrote
Man. What kind of life is that? How rough is it that you come up with a line like, “tryin' to remember words to a song nobody wrote?” I love that. There’s not enough of it in music today.
If That Lonesome Song is too upbeat for you, and you have a relationship you’re not quite over yet, stay away from his cover of Dreaming My Dreams With You unless you have tissues handy. You’ve been warned.
While we’re at it, let’s hit Cover Your Eyes from his next — and essentially last — studio album, The Guitar Song, which is a double release with 26 songs. After this one, I’ll stay more upbeat, I swear.
He had some success with Playing The Part, which I remember hearing on the radio once, maybe twice. By Jamey Johnson standards, it’s a fun, and funny, upbeat song.
But with lyrics like, “taking depression pills in the Hollywood hills,” it’s certainly not of the radio single formula. I’m guessing some of the success was due to the great music video and surprise celebrity cameo, but it’s a fantastic song in its own right and deserved a wider audience.
A recurring theme for these artist profiles is authenticity. The artists I’m highlighting all have that in common. Maybe even more so with Jamey Johnson because he was the cutting edge of next-generation outlaw country.
I’ve read Sturgill Simpson and Cody Jinks led the way for the next batch of up-and-comers, but Jamey Johnson was slogging through the Nashville muck with “a sound of my own, somewhere between Jennings and Jones.”
Bonus fact: If, like me, you noticed a difference between the cleaner cut younger Johnson and the more recent Grizzly Adams look, Johnson was a mortarman in the United States Marine Corps Reserves before breaking into music.
Which maybe helps him stay grounded and remember things like, “It’s a b*tch at the bottom.
Until next time, Friends.
