The String King

Burnett performs on the first day of the annual Jazz Fest in New Orleans in 2007. credit: photograph by David Rae Morris/EPA/Corbis

Though he decamped for Los Angeles more than thirty years ago, T Bone Burnett remains firmly rooted in the South. Born in St. Louis, he moved to New Orleans before spending his formative years in Fort Worth. Burnett has crafted a unique sound based in the blues, folk, and country. He’s currently playing guitar for the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss tour in support of their exceptional album, Raising Sand (which Burnett also produced). He’s also helming new album projects by Elvis Costello, B.B. King, John Mellencamp, and the Who. “I’m busy, busier than I’ve ever been,” he says. “But I wouldn’t have it any other way.” And whether he’s serving as music’s most in-demand producer or supervising the sound track for films like O Brother, Where Art Thou? (which won the Album of the Year Grammy in 2002), Burnett has always infused his music with the tenets of his upbringing: passion, respect, and the truth. Here, the affable sixty-year-old chats about his idols, rock legends, and the best burgers in the world.

G&G: What’s your earliest musical memory?
Burnett: Mardi Gras. I remember standing on the street and people throwing jewelry, bands playing. I was like two or three. But the first song I remember was “Begin the Beguine” by Cole Porter. My parents had a lot of that stuff: Porter, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Rodgers and Hart. They had good taste and knew what to listen to.

G&G: Did you start playing music at a young age?
Burnett: We moved to Fort Worth when I was four and I probably started playing guitar at age ten. I started playing out in Fort Worth and we went and made a record when I was sixteen to try to scare up gigs. A studio came up for sale, and my friends and I bought the studio right after high school. We got a loan from the bank. It was like twenty grand.

G&G: Where were you playing gigs?
Burnett: My first gig was at the Skyliner Ballroom. It was Jack Ruby’s nightclub. We played things for the kids at school. There was sort of a teenage music scene in Fort Worth when I was growing up, lots of kids in bands. And there was a great tradition of music in Fort Worth. Hootie Ledbetter had been a street singer, Blind Willie Johnson, all of that blues stuff. Bob Wills was from there. The electric guitar was invented down the road. They used to take a phonograph needle and stick it through the wood in the guitar and then play it back through record players. A lot of bluegrass and country music was around too. It was a rich musical culture.

G&G: Was there something distinct about Fort Worth?
Burnett: Maybe it was just the people who managed to get out of there by playing music. It seemed like a pretty low ceiling in Fort Worth when we were kids. It was a way out. There were a lot of great musicians. Delbert McClinton was playing around. Willie Nelson was in town. It seemed more real to me than anything else that was going on. But if we’re talking about Southern culture, so much of it was due to the military-industrial complex that came into the South because they wouldn’t be watched. NASA, Wernher von Braun—the Nazi rocket scientist who settled in Alabama. In Fort Worth, from the time I can remember there were B-52s just circling all day and night. They told us that they were protecting the strategic air force base there because we were the third Russian target in order of priority. That puts no pressure on a six-year-old kid at all. Only years and years later did I find out that the B-52s would fly over the Pacific, refuel, drop the bombs on Vietnam, and fly back. That was part of that ceiling that we all lived under and had to get out of. That death from above. It all seemed so pointless. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I still can’t.

G&G: Fort Worth has a great art history. Were you exposed to that at all?
Burnett: There was this guy Jim Meeker who was an oilman as well as a major art collector. He used to bring in guys like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. It was a huge influence on me. These people looked at things in a way that no one I grew up with had even thought of. They were funny, smart—and there was also more of that sense of escape and getting out that was real. Those people felt free. We heard about freedom all the time, but there wasn’t any in Fort Worth. And it seemed like these people had it. I remember hearing in an art gallery someone saying, “I don’t like modern art, because that ain’t the way God intended the world to be.” And to Warhol and those people, that kind of thought wouldn’t even graze them.

G&G: How did you reconcile that? Religion has always been an important part of your life.
Burnett: My parents weren’t conservative or liberal. They were live and let live. That was the beautiful thing about most people in Texas in those days. The law was “live and let live.” And it’s turned very much from that to a “mind everyone else’s business” kind of place. There was not a conflict in me, because religion to me was about freedom. I thought there was some nexus there. And that’s the nexus I’ve been exploring the whole rest of my life.

G&G: What are your favorite places in Fort Worth?
Burnett: The New Bluebird nightclub and Mabel’s Eat Shop were really great. They were two beautiful blues joints across the street from each other. They were just dives. One day, in fact, Mabel’s Eat Shop fell over sideways. All four walls just went out. It was just lying on the ground. Before that, though, Mabel had a hot plate and she would cook fried chicken in the back part of the club and then in the other club there was dancing. It was very much like a juke joint. The Bluebird is still standing, and nearby was a Baptist church so on Friday night the whole area was just going off. Then there’s the Paris Coffee Shop, which is wonderful Southern cooking. And Kincaid’s Hamburgers. In the back there was Old Man Gentry, who would grind up the meat, and the burgers were so incredibly good that we took every guest in town to Kincaid’s. We took Warhol and all those guys there to show them the true Fort Worth.

G&G: Do you have musical idols from
the South?
Burnett: Howlin’ Wolf, most definitely. He fought hard and stuck with it. He always paid his musicians health and welfare benefits. He was the only blues cat to do that. He didn’t know how to read or write—he learned when he was fifty. He’d be at these honky-tonks studying and then he would just get up and scare the pants off the audience.

G&G: What are your quintessential Southern albums?
Burnett: Wilbur De Paris, At Symphony Hall. This album contains the transcendent “Wrought Iron Rag.” This is a band achieving liftoff. Howlin’ Wolf, His Best. It has the indelible “How Many More Years,” which was the first rock-and-roll record with Ike Turner playing piano. And Skip James, The Complete Early Recordings, with “Devil Got My Woman,” “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues,” and “Special Rider Blues.” It’s conjuring music.

G&G: You’ve worked with everyone from Bob Dylan to B.B. King. Have you ever been in awe of anyone?
Burnett: Not anyone in particular. But I’ve been in awe of life. Someone like Dylan, he’s the Homer of our time. Being a participant in his process at various times has filled me with a sense of awe. I look at Bob and ask: “How do you live in this all the time?” I wouldn’t say I’m in awe of him, but I’m in awe of “the thing.”

G&G: What did Dylan teach you?
Burnett: The big thing was to be fearless. It was hard to get him to commit to something, but once he did he was just fearless and did not waver at all in his commitment. That’s who he is.

G&G: Are you still learning?
Burnett: Oh yeah, every day. That’s the great thing about a life in music: It’s a never-ending story. I believe listening to music makes you smarter. An athlete’s skills diminish over time, but a musician’s skills increase as you get older. It’s a beautiful thing.