Several years ago, I remember seeing real estate signs around town that read “James Talley and Associates.” At first I didn’t give them much thought, but then a sinking feeling came over me: Could this be the same James Talley whose mid-’70s records evoke the populist spirit of John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie? Could this be the singer-songwriter who has been lionized by critics such as Greil Marcus and Peter Guralnick? The same man who was invited to play at Jimmy Carter’s 1977 presidential inauguration? Surely, I thought to myself, a visionary artist like Talley receives enough support that he can pursue his craft full-time.

It turned out to be the James Talley, all right. “Probably more people in Nashville know me in the real estate business than in the music business,” the thoughtful, soft-spoken performer admitted during a recent interview. He then went on to tell me how he ended up where he is today: In the late ’70s, he followed the short-sighted advice of his manager and left Capitol Records to look for a label that would give his work the promotional support it deserved.

That was more than 15 years ago. Looking back now, Talley’s timing couldn’t have been worse; with the nation in a deep recession, the late ’70s were a terrible time to shop for a record deal. “You couldn’t get signed to a label,” remembers Talley. “A handful of established acts, people like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, carried the labels through those lean times, so unless you were a proven commodity, you weren’t going to get signed.”

With bills to pay and a family to support, Talley had little choice but to look for a day job. He ended up in real estate. Having worked as a social worker and a carpenter to finance the release of his autobiographical debut album, Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, But We Sure Got a Lot of Love, he was no stranger to the bi-vocational life. Becoming a Realtor, however, was no doubt difficult for the man who wrote the staunchly anti-capitalist “Are They Gonna Call Us Outlaws Again?” It wasn’t a decision that Talley entered into lightly. “We spend our energy where we have to,” he observes. “I just don’t have time to make a living and market what I’m doing [musically]. It’s hard enough to get everything done you need to and be creative.”

All of which isn’t to say that Talley has ignored his muse for the past decade and a half. He recorded two albums during the ’80s, and in 1992 he released The Road to Torreón (Bear Family), a multi-media work in the tradition of James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. A lovely collection of songs and photographs depicting the lives and struggles of Hispanic families living in the mountain villages of Northern New Mexico, The Road to Torreón is a collaborative effort between Talley and his longtime photographer friend Cavalliere Ketchum. “Cavalliere and I were graduate students at the University of New Mexico together back in the late ’60s,” remembers Talley. “I quit grad school and took a job with the Bernalillo County Department of Public Welfare. Working with families [in and around Albuquerque] changed my whole thought process.”

Still an aspiring artist, Talley received encouragement for the project from Pete Seeger the morning after the folksinger performed a concert at the University of New Mexico. Talley remembers Seeger telling him, “I know you like folk music, but don’t try to write folk songs like you hear out of New York City. You’re from the Southwest. Write about what you’ve seen here. Just be honest to yourself and to the people.” Not long afterward, Talley learned that Ketchum had been photographing the families who lived in the Northern New Mexico barrios, and it wasn’t long before the two men decided to make The Road to Torreón. The resulting collection is a powerfully empathetic work that captures the dignified, resilient heart of an all but forgotten people.

Talley returned to New Mexico in 1994 to record an album of Woody Guthrie material entitled Woody Guthrie and Songs of My Oklahoma Home. Tributes to the legendary folksinger abound, but, as Talley observes, “The method of production has usually been to get a group of artists together whose styles are so different that you wind up with an album that jerks your ear around and loses the continuity and messages of Guthrie’s originals.”

Talley wanted to do something more personal. “Woody Guthrie was from a little town in Oklahoma,” he points out. “My family is from Oklahoma. My father’s father had a general store in Welch and my mother grew up on a farm near Stillwater. I’ve had an affinity for Guthrie’s work ever since I discovered it as a teenager.” Nowhere is this kinship more evident than on Talley’s album-closing version of “This Land Is Your Land.” The singer betrays none of the exuberance that made the overworked standard an anthem on the early ’60s hootenanny circuit. Just the opposite, his matter-of-fact performance captures the dissonance—the commingled sense of possibility and loss—at the heart of Guthrie’s original.

Talley has been working on a book of Farm Security Administration photographs from the ’30s and ’40s to accompany his still unreleased Guthrie collection. The University of New Mexico Press is interested in publishing the project, and Talley has also been in conversation with Capitol about issuing the record and reissuing his groundbreaking ’70s LPs. “I would like to resurrect this thing with Capitol,” he admits. “I feel like the return to both of us would be manifold. Besides,” he adds knowingly, “they’ve got so much of my heart already.”

Even if Capitol doesn’t bite, Talley will no doubt keep the faith. “I think you just have to keep going and doing what has meaning to you,” he says. “I gotta believe a lot of this glossy country stuff isn’t going to sustain people’s interest forever. For me, a song must have something in it about real people and real life, it must have heart. It must be feeling, not formula, and it should tell a story. Willie Nelson, whom I have always admired, once said, ‘You can’t make a record if you ain’t got nothin’ to say.’ ”

Nashvillians will have a chance to hear what Talley has to say when he makes his first local club appearance in over a decade Jan. 10 at the Sutler. He’ll be joined by longtime friend and guitarist Doyle Grisham. Besides performing material from throughout his career, Talley may also play unreleased songs like “Oklahoma, You’re OK,” his moving response to the Oklahoma City bombing, and “Nashville City Blues.” Whatever he plays, you can bet it’ll be a memorable evening, a rare chance to hear a gifted poet in his true estate.