More Than a Whisper
Connecting the present with the past through the timeless music of Nanci Griffith
It’s Father’s Day as I write this. I had a nice morning with my kids before I sent them off to Bonnaroo for the day. Now I’m thinking about my dad, Paul H. Strohm, Jr. I’m lucky that my dad is still around and in my life, luckier still that we have a close relationship. My dad’s an English professor, not a musician but a lifelong music lover. He didn’t teach me how to play music, but he taught me how to listen and appreciate music. He shared his love of a wide range of musical styles, including country music. He’s the reason I learned to love the music of Nanci Griffith as a hardcore punk-obsessed teenager.
One of the reasons I was excited to be President of Rounder Records involved a personal connection to the label’s storied history. My dad was in the Class of 1960 at Amherst College. His friend and classmate, Jim Rooney, was a folk musician and country music obsessive from Boston. Jim’s best friend was Bill Keith, a fellow New Englander who went on to be the first non-Southern banjo player in Bill Monroe’s band in the early 60s, one of the great innovators of Scruggs-style banjo. My dad would frequently mention his friend “Rooney” when speaking about music, so I emailed my dad (who splits his time between Oxford and Brooklyn) to wish him a Happy Father’s Day and to get more detail about his friendship with Jim. Here’s what he said:
Rooney was a distinctive figure at Amherst in the 50s.Very well liked, with what was then a very distinctive style for an eastern college setup. I think he had the only Levi jacket around, and packed his guitar around the campus and introduced a lot of people, including me, to Hank Williams as a serious artist. He was softspoken, unassuming, very much his own kind of guy.
Jim went from Amherst to grad school at Harvard, in proximity to the Cambridge folk scene. In Cambridge he became the talent buyer for the grounbreaking Harvard Square listening room Club 47, and later became the talent coordinator for the Newport Folk Festival. Jim and Bill both recorded for Rounder in the early 70s, and each played a significant role in the 70s bluegrass revival that defined the Rounder sound. Jim’s influence informed my dad’s listening and record collection. My dad took my brother and me to see Jim and Bill perform at Bill Monroe’s legendary Bean Blossom Bluegrass festival near our home town of Bloomington, Indiana, in the mid-70s. More from dad:
Jim and I kept loosely in touch after graduation and I knew he was coming to Bill Monroe's Bean Blossom festival, and took you guys with me to hang with him and soak up the atmosphere. We hung with him for a day, walking around and hearing the likes of Monroe himself (who was his fiddler, a particular favorite of mine?) and we heard Dock Watson and Lester Flatt (Earl Scruggs no longer living) and speculated around the fact that we had some Kentucky Scruggses in our Poole (mother’s side) family tree. Introduced us to Mike Seeger and other notables.
I have only vague memories of attending the festival, though dropping that I’d attended the festival in the 70s - and my connection to Jim - gave me credibility with the many bluegrass people I met in my role at Rounder. Jim moved to Nashville in the 1970s and began producing records under the mentorship of Sun Records alumnus, the great Cowboy Jack Elliott. Dad followed Jim’s career and checked in on his various productions, which included albums by John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, Hal Ketchum, Iris DeMent, and Nanci. Jim co-founded Forerunner Music, a successful independent music publisher in Nashville in the 80s, with Forerunner-published hits by Garth Brooks, Vince Gill, and Patti Loveless, among others. Seemingly everyone who worked in country music through the 90s knows and loves Jim.
My dad doesn’t recall if Jim directly introduced him to Nanci’s music, but her early Rounder/Philo albums, Once in a Very Blue Moon and Last of the True Believers were among his favorites during my teenage years. Whether or not Jim’s role led us to the music, it sparked my imagination that we knew someone with such influence and talent. My own tastes in those days focused on aggressive music such as hardcore, but I’d developed a taste for country from early childhood.1
My dad took the time when I was young to explain the history of country music, a topic of great interest to him. He played me early recordings by The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, Leadbelly and Delta Blues. He explained the connection of country to folk and to the “country rock” scene in the 60s and early 70s. He loved Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Will The Circle Be Unbroken by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, which brought West Coast country rock musicians together with some of the founding artists of country and bluegrass. By the time the Nanci records entered the house, I understood how her music fit into the larger picture of folk and country. Dad’s a lyrics guy, ever the intellectual, while I tend to connect viscerally with voices and melodies. Nanci had it all, and we wore those records out. For years, Nanci Griffith was a Sunday staple on the Strohm stereo.
Those albums gave me a framework to appreciate other folk and folk-adjacent music that followed, from Iris DeMent to Suzanne Vega and Lucinda Williams. During my active years touring and making indie records, I saw Nanci perform several times. By the time I started my job at Rounder in 2017, I considered Nanci Griffith as one of my all-time favorites. I followed her output through the 90s, including her Rooney-produced, Grammy-winning covers album Other Voices, Other Rooms and its sequel, which helped introduce me to some of my favorite songwriters, including Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, and Richard Thompson. I learned about Nanci’s connection to the great tradition of Texas songwriters, her influences, and her influence on many great writers inspired by her work.
I had a pretty long list of things I hoped to accomplish in my role as Rounder head, with bringing Nanci back to the label for a new album near the top of the list. Nanci hadn’t recorded and album since 2009, maybe the right opportunity would bring her out of retirement. She lived in Nashville, after all.
I looked up some of the people who worked with Nanci in her prime. Her longtime manager, Bert Stein, suggested it was possible though unlikely. Bert confided that Nanci’s health wasn’t the best and she didn’t go out much. I talked it over with my friend Ken Levitan, a successful Nashville artist manager and entrepreneur who managed Nanci in the prime of her career as a hit country artist on MCA Records in Nashville. Ken thought new music from Nanci would be a longshot, but we hatched an idea. What if we co-produced a tribute album for a charity close to her heart,2 featuring both her contemporaries from the prime of her career and younger artists who have been influenced and inspired by her music?
Ken and I got to work putting together a wish list and reaching out to artists. It wasn’t hard to find great artists who considered Nanci a peer, an inspiration, or both. I took the opportunity to connect with Rooney, who primarily lives in Vermont but visits Nashville frequently for business and to perform with his loosely organized group, Rooney’s Irregulars. Jim remembered my dad fondly, and we developed a nice friendship around his frequent Nashville visits. Jim loved the idea of the tribute and pledged to help in any way he could. He called on his old pals John Prine, Lyle Lovett and Iris DeMent and arranged sessions in Cowboy Jack Clement’s Nashville home studio, Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa, where Jim recorded Nanci’s Rounder albums.
Jim called on a few of his close friends and longtime collaborators John Prine, Lyle Lovett, and Iris DeMent, each of whom readily agreed to record their favorite Nanci Griffith songs. As it turned out, John Prine’s recording of Love at the Five & Dime with protegee Kelsey Waldon is one of his final recordings before he passed away from Covid complications in 2020. Ken and I recruited a strong roster of artists eager to express their love for Nanci’s music, including Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, Sarah Jarosz, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Shawn Colvin, The War & Treaty, and Mary Gauthier, who also provided heartfelt liner notes expressing her deep gratitude for Nanci’s music.
Another big objective at Rounder involved creating connections between the label’s storied past, the active artist roster, and the cutting edge of roots music. Young artists wanted to record for the label for a variety of reasons, but clearly being part of such a rich lineage meant a lot to young musicians. A passion project such as a tribute to a favorite singer-songwriter probably won’t do much to grow revenue, but I felt strongly that bringing these threads together helped to reinforce a narrative of the label that transcended commerce. It’s a daunting responsibility to carry forward a legendary label brand with over 50 years of culture. One way forward is leaning on the past, great artists like Nanci and innovators like Rooney, to make the connections between past, present and future.
That’s all good and well with best intentions, but sometimes life gets in the way. We planned to release the tribute in the fall of 2020 around a live event during Americanafest week in Nashville in September. We held a place for a new Nanci Griffith track on the album, and an appearance on stage at the tribute. Then…you know what happened. I won’t get into it, but Covid changed everything. My role at the company changed, the team I led changed, and like everyone else we struggled to keep things afloat as we adjusted to lockdowns and remote work. I pushed the project back to 2021 in hopes we could do the tribute in 2021. Things dragged on and on with the project barely simmering on the back burner. Then Nanci passed away in August 2021, with the project unfinished and in limbo.
I’m extremely grateful that Nanci heard and loved most of the tracks included on the album. She spent her final years in relative isolation and out of the public eye. She didn’t have a sense of how much her music meant to so many great musicians, her peers and the younger generation of roots artists. Nanci’s will left her Rounder albums and other works to Jim. In parallel with the tribute, Concord had been in discussion with Jim to license and reissue the long out-of-print Rounder titles. As the reissue project took shape, the tribute languished. Then in early 2022 I left my job at Rounder without a clear plan for completion or release.
Prior to my exit, I asked my successor, Mark Williams, and my Rounder creative partner, legendary producer Gary Paczosa (who produced several tracks for the tribute) to see the album through to release. Thankfully, Mark and Gary understood the importance of the project and kept their word to see it through despite headwinds for projects with little likelihood of significant revenue during that time. More Than A Whisper: Celebrating the Music of Nanci Griffith finally came out last fall on Rounder in coordination with Concord’s reissues and box set retrospective, Working in Corners. There wasn’t any big event around the release as we’d planned, and the roll-out was pretty low-key. Nevertheless, the album held the #1 spot on Americana radio for weeks that fall. It received some very nice reviews and serves as a heartfelt, beautifully realized tribute to an artist who meant a lot to a lot of other artists.
As a fan, I’m proud to have had a role in bringing this beautiful music to life. I’m grateful for my friendship with Jim, and that it led to my dad reconnecting with his old friend after many years. I’m grateful for music, and how it so often provides the invisible glue that connects us through our common love of beauty, creativity, and sharing our stories - all the things Nanci Griffith prioritized in her timeless work.
My first favorite artist was Glen Campbell, followed by Johnny Cash. I watched their network TV shows and demanded their albums. I owned several Glen Campbell and Johnny Cash records in pre-school.
Ken suggested Cumberland Heights, a substance rehabilitation facility in Nashville that meant a lot to Nanci in her lifetime.
Wow, what a rich history lesson! How lucky you were to have your father deliver you such a front-row seat for such monumental musicians! My dad was Elvis' age, and my earliest memories of cognizance, much less music, are Elvis' first handful of RCA albums scattered on the floor around my Fisher Price record player as a toddler, a holy grail of rock & roll which I will be forever grateful for, but there was almost no other music from his side beyond that, so you hit the lottery with your dad. (One correction: I think your dad got that backwards...Scruggs survived Flatt by several decades).
I had the privilege of seeing Glen Campbell on his last 2 tours, which was fantastic despite the troubles he was starting to experience at the end; his daughter Ashley was doing a lot of heavy lifting vocally and instrumentally on those tours, and as I'm sure you know, she is doing great work of her own now. Not getting to see Johnny Cash will be a lifetime regret. The odd marriage between punk & country finally brought me around to appreciating what I'd long teenage-dismissed as lame 50-year old guys wrapped in the flag. Drumming in a rockabilly band with some guys hip to that educated me to just how badass Johnny and George Jones and Merle Haggard, etc. were, and I haven't stopped diving into that history since. (Hearing 1950s Faron Young, Don Gibson, and Webb Pierce was a revelation, so much more akin to rock and roll than what they came across as on Hee Haw 20 years later when I was forming my first impressions of them...long live Bear Family Records box sets for all of that!) Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for your good work on these projects! I started listening to Nanci Griffith in high school; she was a rare artist that my parents and grandparents all liked as much as I did. (CSNY may be the only other music that we all agreed on.) My dad picked me up from my freshman dorm and took me to see her on the Late Night Grand Hotel tour; that was a wonderful experience.
I’ve been listening to both the tribute album and box set a lot since they came out. Thank you!