Butch Hancock Shares Songs at Nashville’s Famed Bluebird Cafe
Tennessee — Butch Hancock, an iconic Texas songwriter, will be making a
rare Nashville stop when he performs Tuesday night at The Bluebird Cafe
(9:00 p.m.)
A world traveling troubadour with a long
string of recorded songs and albums, Hancock has been called “one of the
finest songwriters of our time” and is acknowledged by his peers and
critics alike as one of the premiere singer-songwriters Texas has ever
produced. His tunes evoke mystical visions of wind-swept dry-plains and
his lyrics are profoundly imaginative, often displaying for his
listeners the miracles that occur in the ordinary through creative irony
and metaphors. His lyrical style has often been compared to that of Bob
Dylan and Woody Guthrie and his songs have been covered by the likes of
Emmylou Harris.
Hancock is also a member of renowned
country rock super-group, The Flatlanders, along with his lifelong
friends, Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, a band they formed in 1972.
During his acclaimed career, Hancock has
written and recorded several landmark albums, some of them sparse and
simple, others as big as the West Texas sky. After moving to the
progressive country hotbed of Austin in the mid 70s, he started his own
label (Rainlight) and released the quintessential West Texas Waltzes and
Dust-Blown Tractor Tunes in 1978. In the years that followed he
continued to release albums deep with meaning and memory, a foundation
that cemented his world-wide reputation as a master wordsmith. In 1990,
Hancock and more than two dozen musician friends staged a Guinness Book
of World Records worthy event entitled No Two Alike and played six
straight nights of live performances in Austin’s famed Cactus Café,
recording 140 of his original songs without repeating a single song. He
released the staggering output later in the year as the
No Two Alike Tape of the Month club. This past year, Butch reprised the
event, this time entitling it, No Two More Alike.