thedailytimes.com : Your 24/7 news source

In the quiet hills of Barb Hollow, near Blount County’s Walland community, singer-songwriter Jeff Barbra eyes with concern the spring providing his home with cold, clear mountain water.

The lack of rain, he fears, may eventually cause it to dwindle to a trickle. Worst-case scenario, he muses, is that it dries up altogether.

But like most folks born and raised in these parts, Barbra is a practical man. The rains will return, he acknowledges, and even if the spring dries up, it will flow again.

When it comes to songwriting, things work about the same way for Barbra. The songs may come in a flood, or they may dry up altogether for a spell. Eventually, however, the muse will open the gates, and the words will spring forth from the fertile ground of his soul.

That’s the way it is for most songwriters, and Barbra is no different. The tunes that make up his most recent album, “Country Music for Country People,” are snapshots of his thoughts and feelings over the past several years. Some feature guitar tracks that were laid down three or four years ago; others, like the moving “My God,” were cut as the recording process was in the final stages.

Despite the scattershot nature of their compilation, however, the songs paint a picture of one of the finest songwriters residing in Blount County today. It’s an aptly named disc, because the sound captures the heart and soul of the rural heart of this region and the people who live in it. It’s a honky-tonk record, perfect for playing the background while a group of friends barbecue and drink cheap beer. It contains moments of reflection and rumination, the kind that play in the background while you sit on a lonely barstool and think about the girl who broke your heart. It’s a portrait of a man who’s at peace with his life and his place in the world.

“I’m to the point now where I’m really happy,” Barbra told The Daily Times this week. “Sarah (Pirkle, his wife and musical partner) have done the Jeff-and-Sarah thing for 10 years, man. We’ve had a good time doing it, but we’ve been through so much crap, so many ups and downs.

“Now, I’ve got a job playing music five days a week (with the bluegrass band White Oak Flats, which performs in Gatlinburg daily) where I can get a salaried check. Sarah teaches music students. It’s cool to have a normal life and not be waiting for the phone to ring from our publisher in Nashville, waiting on whether the next Alan Jackson cut might be one of our songs.”

Most folks around these parts are familiar with Barbra, or at least with his music. He and Pirkle won the 2000 Merlefest Songwriting Contest, and for several years, they hosted the “Behind the Barn” concert series, broadcast weekly on WDVX-FM from Barley’s Taproom in Knoxville’s Old City, where the two opened for a different regional or national roots-music act. They released several albums together, including the most recent “Barb Hollow Sessions,” and the compliment of Barbra’s acoustic guitar and Pirkle’s fiddle made for some fine folk/bluegrass/Americana.

But “Country Music for Country People” is perhaps closer to the center of Barbra’s heart than anything else he’s done.

“I write more of the country stuff than Sarah does, and I’ve always listened to old-school country — guys like Vern Gosdin and Buck Owens and Merle Haggard,” he said. “When we finished ‘Barb Hollow Sessions,’ I actually had probably three or four songs demoed and started, mostly because I seem to write more songs than Sarah does. She’s one of my favorite writers on the planet, but if it ain’t moving her, she don’t write it.

“Meanwhile, I had three or four tracks in the can, including a few with guitar tracks I had started three or four years ago. Over the last two or three years, I’ve recorded in my living room with blankets held up by PVC pipe to a cabin in Virginia to a workshop where I was teaching these underprivileged children about Appalachian music.”

Eventually, the songs began to flow more rapidly. Barbra began to find inspiration in the simple pleasures and memories of growing up as a country boy in the heart of East Tennessee — picking tomatoes with his grandmother (a photo of which later became the inspiration for the new album’s artwork) ... drinking beer around a fire ring with friends ... listening to the classic country of his heroes, the hardscrabble sound of callused fingers across well-worn six strings pouring forth from tinny speakers and stirring something deep within him.

Pirkle and several of his musical compatriots eventually began to urge him to put out a solo record. At first, going separate ways seemed a little daunting — the couple have done the “Jeff-and-Sarah thing,” as he calls it, for so long that doing solo records just didn’t seem right. But the idea grew on him, fueled by their separate musical identities. He had gone on to hook up with several like-minded musicians in the hardcore honky-tonk band The Drunk Uncles, and Pirkle was playing Old Time music with the Maid Rite String Band. The time had come, he realized, to take a breather.

“We agreed a long time ago that music comes first for us as a couple, and really the marriage is secondary,” he said. “We respect each other as artists first. Like Sarah said — we’re more like brother and sister, and music is our mother. And we fight like brother and sister. But I still value her opinion above anybody else’s, and she was as involved on this one as on any other record we made together.”

From the outset, “Country Music for Country People” makes a statement — “Only Sad, Sad Songs Make Me Happy” is a steel guitar-driven ace-in-the-hole that sets a pace and straddles the fence between two moods — moping and hell-raising — perfectly.
It would be hard to find a weak spot on the record whatsoever, and several of the songs would sit well on any album coming out of corporate Nashville today. From the coal-mining ode “Shine a Little Light On Me” to the Tom T. Hall sing-along “I Like Beer” to the gently introspective “These Hills,” “Country Music for Country People” is about friends and family and standing on the back porch at the end of a hard day, the smell of supper wafting through an open kitchen window, dogs lazing about under your feet, the sun setting behind nearby tree-topped ridges, a cold beer in hand and a good woman wrapping her arms around your waist.

“At the end, it’s what the name says — country music for country people,” he said. “On the mix, I wanted to put that Vern Gosdin-meets-Buck Owens verb on there. We recorded with a big Norman microphone with a lot of pre-tube gear, because we were really going for that old-school, loose feel. And everybody who hears it tells me, ‘This is really you.’ And that makes me feel good, man.

“I’m not trying to sound like anybody else. These are my tunes, and it works whether you’re digging into the material, listening to the lyrics, or putting it on as a party record. You can put it on and listen to the whole thing.”

If there’s a standout track on the album, it’s “My God,” written at the tail-end of the recording process. It’s an anthemic declaration of a simple man who’s tired of the Almighty’s name being used as a pawn for political and social causes. At first, Barbra was skittish that it wouldn’t be received well with the conservative folk he calls his friends and neighbors. It turns out he needn’t have worried.

“Every time I play that song, I have two or three people come up and say, ‘That’s exactly how I feel,’” he said. “At first, I thought, ‘Am I the only one who feels this way?’ That’s my statement about dragging God into any kind of politics, whether it be left or right. There’s a lot of people who drag God into everyday things where He don’t belong.

“He gave us our own brains to make our own decisions and our own mistakes. To me, praying to God for petty stuff like who will win the next election is way less than what we should be doing.”

If there’s any justice in the world, some Nashville artist will take heed of the song and turn it into a No. 1 hit. Given it’s potential incendiary nature, however, that probably won’t happen. Corporate Nashville likes to play it too safe, but Barbra is tired of that game.

“Every day for two years, we were waiting on phone calls to see if somebody was going to cut one of our songs,” he said. “That’s like waiting to see if you hit the lottery every day, when really, it’s just a roll of the dice. I’m just so happy to not be doing that anymore. I’m still practicing and still writing, and I’m not against success, but I don’t want to be a big star. I’m happy doing what I’m doing, and like I told Sarah the other day, I’d be just as happy if all we ever did was raise kids and tomatoes.”