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Ronald Kidd - October 8, 2021

Do You Know John Hiatt?

When my wife Yvonne and I moved to Nashville, we began listening to country music. What we found ourselves gravitating to, however, was sort of country and sort of not.

The music had steel guitars, but it also contained echoes of blues, bluegrass, folk, and R&B. A few years later it came to be called Americana, but at the time we just knew that we liked it. Some of our favorite artists were Lyle Lovett, Wynonna Judd, Nanci Griffith, Iris Dement, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and a gravelly-voiced, unclassifiable singer-songwriter named John Hiatt.

In Hiatt’s album Bring the Family, he performed songs with quirky, funny, beautiful lyrics, sung to a rocking beat: “Lipstick Sunset,” “Thing Called Love” (later made famous by Bonnie Raitt), “Your Dad Did,” and the hilarious “Memphis in the Meantime.” 

Now Hiatt has a new album, Leftover Feelings, recorded with dobro genius Jerry Douglas and Douglas’s band at Nashville’s historic RCA Studio B where, between 1957 and 1977, everyone from Elvis Presley to Dolly Parton to Connie Smith to the Everly Brothers made music.

At the recent Nashville Film Festival, I was lucky enough to catch (virtually) a new documentary, also called Leftover Feelings, about the making of the album. Watch it if you can, to meet these two friends and consummate artists. If you can’t, dip into the album and see if you like it. Here’s a link to one of the songs, “Long Black Electric Cadillac,” and the official music video at YouTube.

Now Available

  • Lord of the Mountain
    The “big bang” of country music in 1927 at Bristol, Tennessee.
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  • Room of Shadows
    Edgar Allan Poe returns and gets the glorious death he deserved.
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Learn about my books, plays, and music at ronaldkidd.com.
Download a sampler of chapters from some of my latest books.

Copyright © 2021 Ronald Kidd, All rights reserved.


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