Country Music from South Georgia

11 MP3 Songs
COUNTRY: Country Rock, COUNTRY: Country Folk



Details:
In the Spring of 2000, there was a chance meeting between a young songwriter named Geoffrey Stokes Nielson and country legend Willie Nelson. After hearing an 11 song demo entitled "The Story of the New Age Cowboy", Nelson put the young man's band, the two-month-old Lost Trailers, on his 4th of July Picnic in Austin, TX, then offered them opening slots throughout the Southeast. This started the foundation for the Atlanta-based group to spread their style of country music throughout the U.S.

This CD is a collection of songs dealing with the overlooked songwriters who live in the shadow of Music Row, specifically with a friend of Nielson's who died penniless in the back seat of a Cadillac next to a bar called Bobby's Idle Hour. Two years later, the Trailers would be scooped up by Universal Records and eventually release the highly acclaimed album "Welcome to the Woods". This recording represents the first studio effort of the band, and includes original masters of songs like "Dougherty County" and the epic small-town battle, "The YMCA Sportspark Anti-Massacre". Produced by Kenny Royster, Ryder Lee, and Geoffrey Stokes Nielson.

"The Lost Trailers songs get better with each listen, and plumb the experiences of the down-and-out, the sometimes confused, but always determined man. "The YMCA Sportspark Anti-Massacre", a hidden track about a high school fight on Story of The New Age Cowboy is storytelling on par with Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" and any Dylan tune about youth gone wild."

John Brewer
The San Antonio Current

"Singer Stokes Nielson is blessed with a gritty voice that can make any song sound better and truer. He's also a literary storyteller and his songs about small-town romance and hard-luck characters are almost Springsteenian in their ability to capture the essence of a time and place."

Joe Heim
The Washington Post



The Story of the New Age Cowboy

The first person I met in Nashville was a man who introduced himself as 'Easy' at a place called Bobby's Idle Hour right off of Music Row. Easy bought me a beer, welcomed me into the group of gristled old songwriters that were gathered around the bar, and passed me a guitar that he was holding. I don't remember the song that I played that day, but I remember Easy saying it wasn't too bad, and the rest of my first year in Nashville was spent hustling around town for money and gigs, and frequent stops to the Idle Hour to try out new songs and hang with Easy and the boys.

Something about the atmosphere of that bar; the music, the smoke, the beer, the laughter, the cussing, the random women who seemed to ramble in and out of the lives of those songwriters, seemed to have so much more allure to me than the huge corporate offices of the major record labels that straddled Music Row. Bobby's was in the shadow of those huge buildings, and Easy with his boys were the castoffs, the throwaway's, the musicians who'd been there for years doing their own thing without any intention of compromise. It was a romantic, and dangerous, way to live, and was the reason why most of them were dirt poor with no way out.

More than one person told me about songs that Easy had pitched to folks along the row early on, and how some of them magically ended up being performed, recorded, and "written" by other acts. When I asked Easy about this he said, "Aw, that's just how it goes sometimes." Well, just because things are the way they are, doesn't mean that's the way they have to be, and being that I was an idealistic 21 year old kid, I started writing songs to document what it was like to live in the shadow of Music Row.

The songs were not winning songs, they were fighting songs, fighting for dreams and ideals, fighting for music as a passion as opposed to music as a business. I recorded the songs on practically no cash, and the musicians on those masters were basically friends of mine who did their parts for peanuts, and when we needed something extra, like a banjo or violin or female vocal, someone would make a call, and then a stranger would show up out of the blue and record a part, and then disappear. I remember the day Redd Volkaert, Merle Haggard's guitarist, showed up to play on some tracks (New Train and Little Susie), and then wouldn't take any cash for it. I guess he knew I was broke, but thought the idea of the album was interesting. I could only afford drums for half of the songs, the rest were just acoustic and vocals with a few instruments, most were done on first or second takes. I wrote what I was experiencing, which was being an outsider and yearning for home, but still believing that if you wrote great songs then you could make it.

The first person I wanted to play it for when it was done was Easy. I went down to Bobby's Idle Hour to find that Easy was gone. Two days prior they had found him dead, strewn out on the backseat of his old broken down caddy parked behind the bar. He wasn't the first country singer to die in the back of a caddy, and he probably won't be the last, but Easy's tragedy was the end of the innocence for me. It made country music real to me, and I went home and wrote "Under FM Waves," recorded it, then sent the CD into production, and got ready to go back to Georgia.

When it was done, it wasn't pitched to anyone, it was just printed onto 1,000 CD's and sold out of my truck. The picture on the front of "The Story of the New Age Cowboy" is of Easy playing guitar in front of the Parthenon in Nashville . I found the pic a week after Easy died and knew that it was supposed to be the cover of the album. Through word of mouth, "The Story of the New Age Cowboy" got out on its own. It didn't need a smooth marketing ploy or a strategic national plan, it just needed, and needs, ears to hear it. It ain't the greatest sonic thing you're ever gonna listen to, but the songs are true and real, and somewhere in it is the heart of musicians like Easy that fought the good fight and lost. Is that something to celebrate? I don't know, but it's damn worth writing about.

-GSN