Haggerty (center) running for Washington state Senate in 1988
Patrick Haggerty wears his lavender cowboy hat with sublime confidence, but the creator of the world’s first openly gay country album, 1973’s Lavender Country, still hasn’t achieved the Nashville stardom he deserves. That doesn’t matter, since the community activist and fearless musical explorer has become a cultural hero whose work has inspired a generation of young innovative musicians and filmmakers who have helped bring his ideas to life, just as he had always hoped. Haggerty returns to town this week to receive Nashville Pride’s 2017 Trailblazer Award, recognizing his musical and political achievements, Thursday during the Pride Pre-Party. He’ll also perform Sunday with some of the young musicians who’ve been brought into his fold because of the ways Lavender Country challenges notions of musical decorum.
Born Sept. 27, 1944, in Hoquiam, Wash., Haggerty grew up working hard alongside his nine siblings on a dairy farm in Port Angeles, a town about 90 miles east of Seattle. After being kicked out of the Peace Corps in 1966 for being gay, he moved to Missoula, Mont., where he became a social worker. Later, while attending graduate school at the University of Washington, he sang in local coffeehouses. A self-taught musician with an expressive voice, Haggerty formed Lavender Country in 1972 with fiddler Eve Morris, guitarist Robert Hammerstrom and keyboardist Michael Carr. In early 1973, they recorded Lavender Country, which was sold by mail order in underground gay publications.
Haggerty reissued Lavender Country in 2000 after writer Chris Dickinson profiled him in a 1999 article on gay country singers in the Journal of Country Music. He put together a new edition of the band, but the record remained obscure. Listeners rediscovered the album when one of its tracks, “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears,” appeared on YouTube more than a decade later. In 2014, the North Carolina label Paradise of Bachelors reissued the LP. This time, Lavender Country received glowing reviews, and Haggerty found himself in demand. He’d been singing at retirement homes in the Seattle area for years, but his new status as an avatar of avant-garde country meant he would have to assemble a band.
Like the late Chuck Berry, Haggerty has relied on the simplicity of his tunes to attract a series of pickup groups composed of Lavender Country acolytes. While the album is an unrepeatable sonic experiment — Carr’s embellishments collide with Morris’ droning fiddle licks and Haggerty and Hammerstrom’s guitar playing to create a uniquely anarchic sound — the young musicians Haggerty has gathered around him have reimagined his music.
Haggerty’s labelmates, now-disbanded Music City rockers Promised Land Sound, performed as his backing band for a series of shows in 2016, including a Record Store Day gig at Nashville record shop Fond Object that Haggerty remembers as “a magical night.”
“I love the Promised Land guys,” Haggerty tells the Scene by phone from his home in Bremerton, Wash. “I didn’t know them. I had never met them. You know, their stuff is not country, so I had my trepidations. Here we have four straight, white, Southern-born kids, not country — I thought, ‘What am I getting myself into?’ I got off the plane and met them, and they were way past my wildest expectations in their enthusiasm and in their commitment.
“They were completely rehearsed and had all the material down pat,” he continues. “They had countrified themselves beautifully, and they were socially and politically committed.”
For Sunday’s show, Promised Land guitarist Sean Thompson will join a group of St. Louis musicians led by up-and-coming Americana singer Jack Grelle, who Haggerty says has been a Lavender Country fan for more than a decade. Haggerty tells me about director Dan Taberski’s 2016 documentary These C*cksucking Tears, named after one of the album’s most indelible songs. He says there’s a Lavender Country ballet, a movie screenplay and a new album in the works, and he seems energized by the activity.
“I have some really great musicians across the country who are working with me on Lavender Country,” he says. “They’re in L.A., San Francisco, Portland, here in Seattle, St. Louis and Nashville. I’ve got a herd behind me.”
Email music@nashvillescene.com
