Various Artists Just One More: A Musical Tribute to Larry Brown

Renowned author Larry Brown’s business card listed his occupation as “Human Being”. Like many other professional human beings, Larry loved music. He felt music and it showed in his writing. As he moved through the world, Larry got to know a lot of musicians, and a lot of musicians got to know Larry, either personally or through his work.

Just A Few More, A Musical Tribute to Larry Brown is a compilation of tunes by artists who were his friends, fans and peers. With 18 tracks, (plus 8 on the bonus CD) the album has contributions from a wide range of critically acclaimed artists, among them Alejandro Escovedo (whom Larry performed with periodically), T-Model Ford, Vic Chesnutt, Jim Dickinson. Ben Weaver, Robert Earl Keen, Cary Hudson (Blue Mountain), Brent Best (Slobberbone, The Drams) and the North Mississippi Allstars, to name a few. Some of these songs were written for the project, songs for Larry and about his characters, such as Caroline Herring’s “Song For Fay”, exploring the title character of Fay, a novel published in 2000. The album closes with a song performed by Larry himself, accompanied by Clyde Edgerton, a Southern novelist of great renown.

From the liner notes: “The simple concept of this disc was to put together a mix tape of sorts, the type of thing that Larry would have enjoyed listening to as he drove his little truck into the gloam’ with a cooler full of beer and an ass pocket of something that burns a little bit on the way down,” explains producer Tim Lee. “I knew him and I admired his work, and you didn’t have to know Larry well to have a keen awareness of his love of music,” he says. Mary Annie Brown, Larry’s wife concurs, saying, “Larry absolutely loved music. I think he wished sometimes that he had the talent to do music for a living. He always played his guitar every night. If he had to skip playing, he would always say he felt like the day was wasted.”

"From the artists gathered here on this tribute record, it tells me that Larry Brown didn’t just love music, he loved great music." —Cashbox

"For Brown fans one of the joys his stuff has always provided is the music that percolates through his books--his characters always seemed to be rummaging around on the floorboards of some pickup truck, looking for the perfect thing to pop into a tape deck..[This CD] is a good thing to have with you, out riding in the gloam." —New York Times

Some bio info: Larry Brown was born in 1951 in Lafayette County, Mississippi. He was a firefighter with the Oxford, Mississippi Fire Department when he began writing fiction, and after years of struggle and rejection, his first book, a collection of stories entitled Facing the Music, was published in 1988. Brown went on to publish another story collection, Big Bad Love; five novels, including Dirty Work, Joe, Father and Son and Fay; and two works of nonfiction, Billy Ray’s Farm and On Fire. His writing was stark, bluesy and devastatingly honest, filled with characters who lived too hard and loved too hard, and it attracted a cult following far outside of the South. He was a two-time winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction as well as the State of Mississippi’s Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. His love of music led him to write for No Depression magazine on artists he loved, and to contribute liner notes for Oxford band Blue Mountain’s Homegrown album that are a model of poetic depiction. When Brown suffered a fatal heart attack in 2004, he was nearly finished with another novel, A Miracle of Catfish, which Algonquin Books published in March, 2007.