The most sublime songwriter to achieve recent Nashville notice has just spent the previous night bob-tailing a semi to Henderson, Ky., and hauling back an empty trailer in the pouring rain. Now, a few hours later, burly truck driver Robert Lee Castleman is standing sleepy-eyed over his kitchen stove in a wrinkled shirt, stirring a pot of meatballs for his 1-year-old’s impending birthday party.
“Bobtailing,” he explains, “is when you don’t have a trailer. It’s like riding a great big skateboard down the road. You can’t get stopped, because there’s no weight. I don’t like bobtailing in the rain.”
A half-year shy of his own next birthday, the big five-oh, Castleman is nominated for a Grammy. In the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences’ competition for Best Country Song (results to be announced Feb. 27 in ceremonies on CBS-TV), his “The Lucky One,” by Alison Krauss & Union Station, is in the final five. It’s no cinch to win, however. The opposition is all Music Row establishment material: Lonestar’s “I’m Already There,” co-written by Gary Baker, Richie McDonald and Frank Myers; Diamond Rio’s “One More Day” by Steven Dale Jones and Bobby Tomberlin; and two records by Jamie O’Neal, “There Is No Arizona” by O’Neal, Lisa Drew and Shaye Smith and “When I Think About Angels” by O’Neal, Roxie Dean and Sonny Tillis.
Castleman is a professed late bloomer. Having written songs since just past childhood, he has accumulated a few enviable credits—songs cut by the late Chet Atkins and even a guest appearance on an Atkins album. But never before had he savored the sort of success he has tasted in the past couple of years.
Rediscovered by neo-bluegrass diva Krauss, he has seen her popularize not only the “The Lucky One,” but two other songs of his, “Forget About It” and “Let Me Touch You for a While,” the latter Krauss’ new single. He released a CD of his own on Rounder Records in 2000, and one of its exceptional songs, “Stay Here,” now graces Alan Jackson’s When Somebody Loves You album.
But R.L. Castleman still drives trucks, and trucking is no longer the romantic, latter-day-cowboy vocation it used to be. “It’s a high-stress gig,” Castleman says. “When you got a vehicle that’s 70 feet long and bends in the middle and weighs 40 tons, and it’s going down the highway at 70 miles an hour....”
His voice trails off, then briefly resumes. “It’s a lonely life. And it’s hard work.”
So is songwriting, even though his Crazy as Me CD contains some of the most melodic and lyrical music to be heard around the Tennessee capital in years. The macho day job notwithstanding, Castleman’s creations are authentic art, delicate combinations of masculinity and unusually perceptive sensitivity. The words are simple but profound, while, as Krauss has observed, the melodies are wildly original yet sound as if you’ve hummed them all your life.
A military brat born at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, young Castleman grew up on armed services installations in Kentucky, Virginia, California and Germany. Home base, however, was his mother’s birthplace, Martinsburg, W.Va. There he graduated from high school and, with traditional country music deep in his subconscious, headed for Los Angeles and rock ’n’ roll—to get nowhere.
He returned to play in various bands around Martinsburg, making his initial Nashville foray in 1979. His hope was to make it as a songwriter, but no dice. He was informed, he says, that he was a decade ahead of his time, that New York was where he belonged. “Then I moved to New England,” he recalls. “The first time I went up there was ’82 or ’83. Then I moved to Litchfield, Conn., in ’85 to get closer to New York City.”
Soon he had a band he called R.L. Cass & the Checkered Past, which also featured a jazzy guitarist named Pat Bergeson. For a couple of years they played the New York area, appearing often at the storied Bitter End. Record executives eventually came, but their reaction was discouraging. His music belonged in Nashville, they said. So he moved to Tennessee again in ’89, only to be told once more that his music was 10 years ahead of its time. This time, though, the prognosticators were on target. In 1999 Krauss recorded her first Castleman single, “Forget About It.”
“So 10 years from the [second] date when they told me I was 10 years ahead of my time, I must have caught up with myself,” he says.
It happened oddly. In Connecticut he had attended a music workshop at which Chet Atkins had been a guest instructor, and Castleman, a lifelong admirer, struck up an acquaintance. Later in Nashville, he was able to introduce his former band’s guitarist, Bergeson, to the master; Bergeson moved to Nashville too and became an Atkins protégé.
Bergeson went on to marry Alison Krauss, and the newlyweds invited Castleman to a Krauss birthday party that ended in a guitar pull. His songs floored the singer, who not only recorded a couple of them herself, but induced Rounder Records to record and release his CD. The collection received excellent reviews, and Krauss gave Castleman a rare 20-minute opening slot on her next tour. But stardom kept its distance. Even the CD’s songs remained a well-kept secret, discovered only by Alan Jackson.
“If your aspiration is to just be a songwriter in this country today, you’re going to be one lonely sonofabitch,” Castleman advises. “Because you’re not going to have anything. It’s a hand-to-mouth existence, trying to succeed in the music business. More people get killed by lightning.
“Most people my age, their kids are all grown. But I couldn’t ever keep a woman around long enough to have children and then raise ’em. They all think, 'Gosh, how romantic and wonderful’ when they’re sitting in the audience looking at you sing a song. Then they realize you’re living your life out of a suitcase.”
Ironically titled, “The Lucky One” was written years ago to profess a hardheaded determination to regard his life’s glass as half full, rather than the alternative. Since then, the glass has gotten fuller. Around 1994 he met his wife and sometime co-writer, Melanie, with whom he now parents a 6-year-old son and little Cecilia, this day’s birthday girl. “I’m fortunate,” he says, “to have run across Melanie and to have a family. I thank God for that on a daily basis.”
Thus “The Lucky One” turns out not to be so ironic, even though he remains a truck driver to keep meatballs on the table. He even likes his vocation, when it’s a night job. “I enjoy it when there’s nobody out there except maybe me and a couple of other big trucks,” he says. “When you can reach back in the sleeping berth to grab a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and go over the centerline without worrying about running over somebody, that’s when driving’s fun.”
