Biography - Larry Cordle, Took Down and Put Up
Before Larry Cordle played bluegrass, he lived it. His was a childhood of hard-laboring, close-knit families who lived together in rural isolation and entertained themselves when they could with home-made music. It was a way of life that has all but disappeared. Now Cordle has tapped into those experiences for Took Down and Put Up, his richly varied debut album for Lonesome Day Records.
Backed by Lonesome Standard Time, his right-on-the-money band, Cordle offers fresh perspectives on such elemental themes as emotional abandonment, childhood heroes, male vanity, depression, duplicity, the consolations of home and family and the liberating properties of a really sharp car. Highlighting the album is a raucous duet with Travis Tritt called “Rough Around The Edges.”
Cordle is already world-famous as a songwriter, having composed and co-penned such classics as “Highway 40 Blues” (Ricky Skaggs), “Murder On Music Row” (George Strait & Alan Jackson), “Against The Grain” (Garth Brooks), “Lonesome Dove” (Trisha Yearwood), “Mama Don’t Forget To Pray For Me’ (Diamond Rio) and “Two Highways” (Alison Krauss). Nine of the 13 songs on the new album are Cordle’s. But bluegrass fans have long savored him also as a vocalist whom they “discovered” via a string of stellar albums stretching back over the past 15 years.
Cordle was born and raised on a small family farm near the village of Cordell in mountainous eastern Kentucky. Living close by was his boyhood friend and musical wizard, Ricky Skaggs. By the time the two boys reached their teens, they had been joined by fellow bluegrass enthusiast, Keith Whitley, who lived in neighboring Sandy Hook.
“Most of the music we were around was just in people’s houses,” Cordle recalls. “Ricky and Keith were prodigies. I wasn’t that kind of musician. I just happened to be a neighbor who could sing. Luckily for me, all the good musicians in the country wanted to play with them. My granddaddy was a fiddle player who had a grocery store. Somebody was always stopping in to try to get him to fiddle a tune. There weren’t too many weekends when there wasn’t music being played.”
Took Down and Put Up features Cordle’s heartfelt salute to Whitley, the wistful “Song For Keith.” (Whitley died in 1989 at the age of 33.) The song was first recorded on an all-star tribute album in 1994 as “A Voice Still Rings True.” Says Cordle, “I always meant to record that song myself. Keith and I weren’t close for the last 10 years of his life. But there was a time when I was around him a lot. I’m getting great responses from the song. People are really taken with it.”
Eventually the three young friends went their individual ways. After high school, Cordle joined the Navy, where he served for four years. From there, he enrolled at Morehead (Kentucky) State University and earned a degree in accounting. While in school, he played in a local rock band called Hot Lucy and worked part-time with his dad raising tobacco. It was during this period that he began writing songs.
In 1983, Skaggs released his recording of Cordle’s “Highway 40 Blues,” and it went straight to No. 1 on the country charts. “It’s the linchpin of everything I’ve ever done,” Cordle marvels. “Without it, there would be no ‘Murder On Music Row’ or Lonesome Standard Time. There wouldn’t be any of these things.” The song earned Cordle a staff writing position with Skaggs’ publishing company. He has since moved on to write for some of the most prominent publishers in Nashville. Currently, he writes for Sea Gayle Music, the hot new firm owned by singer Brad Paisley and producers Frank Rogers and Chris DuBois.
Cordle began recording his own albums in 1993, starting with Lonesome Standard Time, the name he would give his band. He built his stature throughout the decade with such collections as Mighty Lonesome and Lonesome As It Gets. In 1999, he set the country music community buzzing with Murder On Music Row, a CD that took its title from a song Cordle co-wrote with Larry Shell to condemn the adulteration of country music. George Strait’s producer took note of the song and persuaded Strait to cut it as a duet with Alan Jackson, perhaps country music’s staunchest traditionalist. Although the Strait-Jackson cut was never released as a single, it gained so much attention that both the Country Music Assn. and the International Bluegrass Music Assn. named it Song of the Year.
It came as a surprise to some then in 2004 when Cordle and LST recorded Lonesome Skynyrd Time, a loving tribute to Southern rock giants Lynyrd Skynyrd. That’s no contradiction says Cordle. “I played in a lot of rock and a lot of Southern rock bands. I love that music. I just didn’t think that the country music being done on Music Row deserved to be called country music. I thought that the whole thing—the whole charm—of our industry was being lost. I realize the music business is about selling records, but I felt they were just trying to trash every single thing that had any tradition to it at all. As to the Skinny thing, I’m telling you right now, those guys were just country guys who played electric guitars. Read some of the lyrics without listening to the music and you’ll see that a great deal of them is country-sounding.”
In addition to Cordle, the songwriters on Took Down and Put Up are J. P. Pennington and Les Taylor (from Exile), Jim Rushing, Chris Stuart, Randy Scruggs, R. Van Zant, A. Kooper, R. Burns, Kim Howard Gardner, Leyon O. “Booie” Beach, Bill Caswell, Galen Griffin, Mike Anthony and Larry Shell.
Cordle produced the album with special production assistance from Lonesome Standard Time and Randy Kohrs.
