David Craig: A Life in Music
Behind every famous song is an unsung songwriter
At least one Thursday evening a month, singer-songwriter David Craig can be found perched on a stool with his guitar, playing for an audience that comes to Birdie’s Roadhouse to enjoy an unscripted smattering of blues, country, R&B, roots music, or any number of other genres likely to be played by the musicians who end up jamming that evening. Thursdays are open mic night at the beloved shotgun-turned-music club, and Craig is there as a host, alternately playing, jamming, or introducing musicians who gather to feed their own inspiration as much as to play for the assembled music lovers.
Birdie’s is located in Varnado, a small, rural town in the far northeast corner of Washington Parish, eight miles north of Bogalusa and fewer miles than that from the Mississippi border. Craig is a Bogalusa native, and when he gigs at Birdie’s, he is returning to the center of a musical landscape that gave birth to and shaped his music career. Although, it’s fair to say that after nearly fifty years in the business, Craig can rightly count himself among those who are responsible for shaping and nurturing the music scene in this corner of the world as much as benefiting from it.
In person, Craig makes for an unassuming rocker, outfitted in cargo pants, a t-shirt with a button-down thrown over it, and a ball cap; but he’s got such impressive credentials that a rock-and-roll persona would be almost gratuitous.
Craig started, as so many musicians do, in a high school band, an experience that presented him with two significant opportunities: on the one hand, Craig wrote his first song for the band, which, though he had a long road ahead fine-tuning the craft, launched his career as a singer-songwriter. It was also where he formed a lifelong friendship with Bill “Bleu” Evans, the future owner of the legendary Studio in the Country, where Craig would work with some of the biggest names in the music world.
Craig’s first real brush with success was the result of a serendipitous meeting with an unlikely character who walked into the Government Street D.H. Holmes, where Craig was working as a suit salesman in 1970:
One day this dude came in there with long hair … cool-looking guy … super-cool-looking guy. … So in the course of fitting him for the suit, I said, ‘Man, you don’t look like somebody that’d be wearing this suit.’ And he laughed and said, ‘Well, I’ve got to go to a wedding for one of my college friends.’ I said, ‘Well, what do you do? You look way too cool for the suit.’ And he goes, ‘Well, I manage five rock bands in town.'"
That super-cool gentleman was Jim Brown, a booker and manager of a Baton Rouge-based Southern rock band called Potliquor. (The band was a top regional touring act that combined elements of the blues, Southern rock, and hard rock.) Brown was producing the band’s first album, and he invited Craig over to play a few of his songs. Craig joined them, and when he played an original song called “Riverboat,” he landed his first paying songwriting gig.
“That was the first single they had on the album [called First Taste], and it was a regional hit around here. I actually got some money up front and everything, and that was cool. And that was my first song ever. Boy, I felt, I’m legitimate now.”
With the oversized arrogance that buoys the young, Craig headed for Nashville, even though in retrospect he “was nowhere near knowing how to songwrite.” But his youthful confidence and burgeoning, if erratic, talent convinced someone at Acuff-Rose Publishing Company to sign him.
In the meantime, former bandmate Bill Evans was chasing his own dream back home in Bogalusa: to build a state-of-the-art recording studio on twenty-six acres among the bucolic piney woods of Washington Parish. Evans called Craig in Nashville, luring him back home with the promise of producing and recording opportunities. The studio, which Craig helped build, opened in the summer of 1973.
Craig’s fifteen years at Studio in the Country were his most formative. He worked with some high-caliber musicians, variously producing, engineering, writing, providing studio vocals or guitar, or just “handling” the talent. During his tenure, he worked with Stevie Wonder (Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants soundtrack). He worked with Kansas (Leftoverture and Point of Know Return). He even got to work with Willie Nelson, an opportunity that had him racing back to Bogalusa from Nashville, where he’d returned following a difference of opinion with Evans that ended in a fist fight. (“He and I fought, like, all the time.”)
Craig also fell into another lucky break when Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown came to Studio in the Country to record his 1974 album Down South in the Bayou Country. Craig remembered:
Hoyt Garrick from my hometown had written some songs on [the album]. But I didn’t pay any attention to [Gatemouth]; he was just an old blues guy coming through there, and I wasn’t particularly that wild about blues. So I went about working on my project and the stuff I was doing. And at the last minute—they were going to record the next day—and the producer, Philippe Rault … he comes up and goes, ‘David, do you have any songs for Gate? I’m a couple of songs short.’ I said, ‘Nah, I don’t. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll get a case of beer and stay up tonight and write some if you want.’
Pictured left: David Craig painted this portrait of Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown using his signature “facescape” style. This artwork was used on the cover of Gatemouth’s final album.
Craig wrote two songs that evening: “Breaux Bridge Rag” and “Bad Week for Old Fiddlers.” Gatemouth used both on the album. The next year, Craig wrote four more songs for Gatemouth’s album Bogalusa Boogie Man. By Craig’s count, “Breaux Bridge Rag” has since been re-recorded by fourteen people and counts as “one of the quintessential” songs of the Gatemouth canon.
That fact might be a testament to the versatility of Craig’s songs, which have been adapted by musicians playing very different styles of music. Spend an hour on the Internet listening to samples and clips, and a spectacular range of genres is revealed. The dirty twang of Potliquor’s “Riverboat” is a world away from Gatemouth’s musically eclectic “Breaux Bridge Rag.” Compare those tunes with one of Craig’s more recent songs performed by good friend and country musician Eli Seals or 2013 Louisiana State Fiddle Champ Thomas Jenkins, and one wonders how Craig classifies his own music.
“You know, I don’t know. … I can tell you what there are elements of,” Craig explained. “There are elements of country in there. I was raised in a house where my mother and father loved country music. Elements of rock, because I came up loving rock music through the sixties. … I also like R&B, like Van Morrison. I love the blues now—more of the old style like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and people like that, you know, Etta James. … There are elements of all that in there.”
Whatever the influences, Seals, who asked Craig to work with him on his newest album Slow Dancin’ at the Rodeo (recorded at Studio in the Country), considers Craig’s melodies “second to none. He’s just a musical genius when it comes to melodies.” Seals also hosts open mic nights at Birdie’s, where he and Craig met seven or eight years ago. “[We] just got to hanging out a little bit. And, I don’t know, one thing led to another and we started writing. And our writing styles and ideas … we found very quickly that they really complemented each other,” Seals explained.
Seals also verified what could only be glimpsed in an interview: “There’s never a dull moment; you just never know what to expect coming from David. And I mean that in a good way. He’s just a joy—just a joy—to work with; and at the same time, we’ve managed to accomplish some very good songwriting out of those situations.”
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Craig actually quit the business for many years. Faced with the pressures of family life—he’d gotten married to his first wife and had two children—Craig left Studio in the Country to work offshore for awhile. But he had maintained a relationship with Gatemouth, and that friendship turned out to be the ticket to a third career, as a visual artist.
Craig drew as a child. He also dabbled a bit while working at Studio in the Country, using it as a relaxation technique after long, intense days. But it wasn’t until he married his second wife, graphic artist Cheryl Moss Craig, that he began to develop his drawing and painting skills in earnest thanks to her encouragement.
Working in acrylic, Craig has developed a portraiture style he calls “facescapes.” The personalities he paints are usually music icons, and each face is composed of a collection of pictographs that represent elements of the subject’s life or personality. His facescape of Professor Longhair incorporates a piano keyboard along his jacket, for instance, while his portrait of Gatemouth includes a cactus (because Gatemouth lived in the Southwest for a while), a crane mustache, and the piney woods of Studio in the Country where he first met the bluesman.
The painting of Gatemouth, initially designed to be a t-shirt, ended up as the cover art for Gatemouth’s final album, Timeless. The artwork was featured in the Feb/March issue of Blues Revue, which was subsequently seen by the producer of Colorado’s Telluride Blues & Brews Festival, Steve Gumble. Gumble has since commissioned Craig to create the signature image for the festival twice: once in 2006 and again this year.
These days, Craig is still painting, writing, recording, and generally enjoying a renaissance of his creative energies. He was one of the co-founders of the Bogalusa Blues Festival. (He also created that festival’s inaugural poster of Professor Longhair.) And he continues to collaborate with musicians while also pursuing an album of his own. The working title is A Pilgrim in Birdland, tentatively scheduled for release in early 2015.
In the meantime, catch him at Birdie’s on a Thursday night. He’ll be the regular-looking guy in cargo pants, the one you’d never guess was behind some of Louisiana’s most amazing music making.
Details. Details. Details.
See Craig’s paintings and listen to
his music at davidcraigcreative.com.
Birdie’s Roadhouse
26646 Highway 21 North
Varnado, La.
(985) 732-4032
Telluride Blues & Brews Festival
September 12—14
Bogalusa Blues Festival
September 26—27