Tracy Nelson
“Nashville in 1969 was just heaven.”
This is how Tracy Nelson begins telling me about moving to town during a great year for popular music. The singer and songwriter landed in Nashville with her band Mother Earth after playing a show here in early 1969. Nelson has lived in the Nashville area ever since, and she’s continued to record and play shows at her own rather deliberate pace. In 1969 she released two Nashville-recorded albums that merged R&B, rock ’n’ roll and country. Earlier this year, Nelson garnered her third Grammy nomination, for her 2023 full-length Life Don’t Miss Nobody. She attended the Grammy ceremony in Los Angeles, and she didn’t win, but the nomination — in the Best Traditional Blues album category — shone a light on Nelson’s immense contributions to music over the past 60 years.
“The West Coast — and New York perhaps more properly — [were places where musicians] just had this attitude of how great they were because they were in a band,” Nelson says, speaking from her home in Burns, Tenn., about 35 miles west of Nashville. On Sunday, Nelson, who was born on Dec. 27, 1944, in Madison, Wis., marks her 80th birthday with a rare full-band show at 3rd and Lindsley. The performance will feature a group of musicians that includes keyboardist Steve Conn, guitarist Larry Chaney and singers Dianne Davidson, Vickie Carrico and Lisa Oliver-Gray. Also on hand will be Sylvia Tepper, who sang with Mother Earth as a member of The Earthettes in the late ’60s.
The music on Life Don’t Miss Nobody embodies Nelson’s wide-ranging approach. She retools Eugene McDaniels’ 1966 song “Compared to What” as a modified New Orleans-style groove. As she told me in 2023 about the track, “I had to put some digs to Trump in there.” You can interpret Life Don’t Miss Nobody politically. For Nelson, who lived and recorded in San Francisco in the waning days of the counterculture, it’s a record she’s happy with.
“I have found the recording process really arduous and kind of stressful every time I’ve made a record,” she says. “It’s one of the very few records I’ve ever made that I will go back and listen to just for the hell of it. When I listen to early Mother Earth records, it’s like, ‘Who the fuck is singing that stuff?’ I wasn’t as good a singer then as I am now.”
Nelson’s voice remains compelling on Life Don’t Miss Nobody — an accurate, blues-tinged missile. For longtime fans of her 1960s and ’70s work with Mother Earth and as a solo artist, it’s a validation of her approach. With Mother Earth, Nelson was an experimental bandleader operating in a post-R&B zone that remains unique to the band. Nelson artfully rewrites the New Orleans-style 6/8 ballad on her 1968 tune “Down So Low,” perhaps her best-known song. She soars into gospel space on 1970’s “Andy’s Song,” a superb track from Mother Earth’s Satisfied, which was cut at Nashville’s Jack Clement Recording Studio.
The whiff of countercultural incense you pick up on Mother Earth’s 1968 debut Living With the Animals is present on 1969’s Make a Joyful Noise, which the group recorded at Mt. Juliet recording studio Bradley’s Barn that year. Among the musicians who played on Make a Joyful Noise are guitarist Pete Drake, pianist Hargus “Pig” Robbins and fiddler Johnny Gimble — all now-legendary Nashville session musicians. The album’s combination of soul and country remains prescient.
The brand-new Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum exhibit includes instruments, stage clothing, show posters, previously unseen photographs and more
Nelson recorded Mother Earth Presents Tracy Nelson Country in Nashville in mid-1969 with Pete Drake and guitarist Scotty Moore producing her on a set of country and blues songs that includes Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right” and Bill Owens and Dolly Parton’s “Why, Why, Why.” Released in September 1969 — about a month after Make a Joyful Noise — it stands with The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin as an essential document of the early country-rock movement.
“Those were the days when the record labels were just throwing money away,” Nelson says. “I think we got a $15,000 budget. I was embarrassed, because our budget [for the Mother Earth albums] was, like, $100,000 or something. So I went to Pete Drake and I said, ‘Mercury is coming up with a budget, but it’s not much — it’s only $15,000.’ He said, ‘I could make six records with that.’”
Indeed, those were different days. Nelson released two stylistically disparate records at virtually the same time, and her label signed off on it, even at a somewhat reduced budget for Tracy Nelson Country. No matter the motivation or the commercial calculations, the album — like all of Nelson’s work — has endured. As she tells me, she’s working on a new record.
“I just can’t decide what direction to take. I’ve still got about 30 tunes left over from the last record. What I really want to do is the [same] kind of record I’ve ever done: Just pull together a bunch of tunes that I really like and get the right musicians, and then do it.”
