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Billy Dee
Heart Don't Fail Me Now
Texas Music Round-Up
By David Pilot
 If it really is the
same old tune, fiddle and guitar and nobody knows where we take
it from here, Billy Dee's Heart Don't Fail Me Now is as
good a choice for the On Hold music as any while the suits try
to sort things out. While most casual country music fans probably
haven't heard of Billy, more than most have seen and heard him
through the years. Longtime sideman and consummate pro backing
the likes of David Allen Coe, Johnny Paycheck, Vern Gosdin, etc.
Most recently seen in Texas and the rest of the world holding
down the fort and the bass for Dale Watson over the last half
decade. And like kindred spirit in the stalwart road warrior
category Billy Ray Reynolds, Billy Dee has decided it's his turn
to dance with the bright lights. If you're in need of a heart-rending
foot-stomping soul-searing beer-drinking shit-slinging honky
tonk revival, this soiree's for you.
Billy Dee (real name Billy Donahue don't let the writing
credits throw you when you pick this one up tomorrow) started
to get serious about country music in 1981 when he began gigging
on the bass at the infamous Gilly's. In short order he made
band leader (is that like first chair?) and put his stamp on
the legendary bar. Along the way a lot of the great ones put
their stamp on him, too, and maybe it's a good thing he took
22 years to put this record together. It's better than any
scotch I've tried at the same age. All the country basics are
here, the heartbreak, the sawdust, the barrooms and the back
alleys. Well, there's no train, and no Mama, but then again
there's only twelve songs so cut some slack. The most interesting
thing is the balance between heartbreak's poignant depths ("What'll
I Do") and the humor in the resilience that somehow over
time makes the bitterness finally float away ("May Your
Heart [Rest In Pieces]"). Runner up in the interest category
is the span of vocal ability so easily displayed. The title
track, for example, while clearly Billy Dee, equally clearly
evokes the aforementioned Vern Gosdin. "Don't Give Up
On Love," on the other hand, both musically and vocally
brings some of Conway Twitty's better work to mind. And "Back
To Back," hoss, this is just pure country and pure Billy
Dee. Chris Gilson's quiet but martial percussion groove sets
the tensest of moods, appropriate for lyrics like these:
We both try and try
Nothing lasts forever
Now we're back to being strangers
You and I
And we lay back to back
After the lovin'
Any fool can see
What we had is gone
We lay back to back
Acting like strangers
We lay back to back
When the lovin's done
We lay back to back
When the love is done
The above-noted "May Your Heart" follows this with
the thought every man's had as the one he loved left for another,
and voices what every man's wanted to say when she tried to come
back after it all fell apart. It's brutal and it's cleansing
and, in a certain smoky light, it's funny as hell. This is
one that would've sounded at home on a Gene Watson record, and
Dee manages to uncork a performance that's in that league. Seriously.
Maybe it's those years backing Dale Watson, hearing up close
and personal the voice that would save country music if country
music would listen. Maybe it's all the great ones Dee's run
across and worked with through the decades. Maybe it's just
a wealth of God-given talent that should've been manhandling
and loving a microphone for the past twenty years. It doesn't
hurt to have friends, longtime and real friends, like Redd Volkaert
stepping in to help. Need your lead guitar work to fit the
mood of every song in perfect synchrony? Redd pulled it off
for Merle forever, and he pulls it off for Billy here. Need
your pedal steel to weep angel's tears? Call Ricky Davis.
He was there on the road with Dale all those years too. A
fiddle? Yeah, it is a country record after all. How about Erik
Hokkanen. Getting the picture here? These are some accomplished
players, ones who've worked with Dee repeatedly over the years,
and the result is the sort of practiced and adept delivery we're
accustomed to hearing from the Strangers or the Ace In the Hole
Band. It's decidedly not anything we're used to hearing from
debuts. Remember when country music was practiced and tight
but loose and ragged all at once, remember how it sounded on
those records from Panther Hall when it still had a pulsing heart
bent on busting through the buttons of a starched white shirt?
Remember how session players became the rule and all that remained
might as well have been a demo for a music theory class you skipped
in college? Remember how much the realization of the seismic
shift that followed made you long for the good old days?
Billy Dee does. He could've been singing these lines to the
Nashville machine itself, considering the quality of what he's
put together on Heart Don't Fail Me Now:
You've got that loved on look
All over you
How many men have you
Been lyin' to?
How many arms have held the love
I'd always thought so true?
You've got that loved on look
All over you
All that, and two of the strongest songs still got saved for
last. "Rodeo Cowboys" won't see airplay simply for
the liberal use of the word "shit," but a truer picture
of the last vestiges of the cowboy and the way they manifest
themselves in our modern world hasn't been written. Whoever
does write a better take will need one hell of a voice to get
their point across half as well. And "Billy the Kid,"
a track with high potential for suckage based simply on the industry's
widespread abuse of the metaphor, instead paints a soaring picture
of the Southwest's favorite icon and the romantic code of honor
young William Bonney is reputed to have held. Driven along
incessantly by CDB-style fiddle work and Dave Sanger's pounding
rhythms, it winds up the sort of story song that grows its own
legends.
The emergence of a Billy Dee these days is significant.
With apologies (lots of 'em) to Ray Wylie Hubbard who said something
similar once about Chris Wall, it will take artists like this
to deliver us from the ever-encroaching atrocity that our beloved
Texas Music is beginning dangerously to resemble. You can keep
your beer, beer, Luckenbach. Put me down for this instead.
It's different, it's refreshing and it's clearly the product
of years spent in the belly of the beast watching as country
music changed and grew. But the themes, the storytelling, the
ability to pierce the soul, these things are timeless and above
the ravages of change. Yeah, Hank did do it this way.
More online at www.billyfdee.com
Contact David Pilot at: tailgunner-at-rockzilla.net
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