Behind the Song: Billy Bob Thornton, “That Mountain”

He’s streamed into homes each week as the down-and-out attorney of Amazon’s Goliath, but may be best-known to a lot of people as the guy who made it fashionable to say, “Some folks call it a sling blade, I call it a Kaiser blade. Mm-hmm.” Musically speaking, though, his serious followers know that Billy Bob Thornton has been singing and playing the drums much longer than he’s been acting.

As both a solo act and a member of the musical aggregation called the Boxmasters, Thornton’s musical tastes are what one might expect from a guy who could write and direct something as original as Sling Blade, and portray a chain-smoking barber in the Coen Brothers film noir The Man Who Wasn’t There, as well as other left-of-center characters. While the British Invasion-loving Boxmasters have been called everything from psycho-billy to country-rock, Thornton’s own solo albums, four of them, have been just as eclectic. The one song of his that may be the most resonant with fans of both camps is “That Mountain,” from his first album Private Radio.

Thornton takes the first-person approach here in a song about his fictional mother, a woman in her 80s who never left the rural southern holler she was born and raised in to see the outside world. “That Mountain” was written by Thornton and his producer, the ubiquitous Nashville icon Marty Stuart. This somewhat-traditional train song is a country/bluegrass number of three verses with the chorus repeated three times, featuring understated, low-mixed solos on mandolin and guitar and Stuart chiming in on Bill Monroe-inspired harmonies. 

In a nod to the old joke about the guy who left his wife and kids to go out for cigarettes and never came home, well, that’s basically what Thornton’s character’s father does here:

Twenty years ago, today my daddy left this holler 

He said, “I’ll be coming back tomorrow night”
I remember the sound of his boot heels in the gravel 

Well, he ain’t been back since and he never said goodbye

Thornton told the Oxford American in 2001 that he was going to go against his usual marketing philosophy in promoting “That Mountain,” and the album it came from, by making a video to accompany the song (which is attached below). 

“I’m going to do something kind of revolutionary, if they let me,” he said. “I’m against videos. I hate them. They pretty much ruined music and movies. But if I’m going to do one for this album, I’ve got to do it with some sort of artistic integrity. So I’m going to make a video of one of my songs called ‘That Mountain.’ It’s Dwight Yoakam’s favorite song on the record. Anyway, I want to shoot the whole video in one shot. Just an old lady on a porch.” And that’s exactly what he did.

The video, however, doesn’t tell the whole story. The actual recording on Private Radio features Thornton and Stuart talking in the studio for the first minute and 15 seconds, with Thornton explaining how the song is based on a true story about an old woman in Kentucky who never went over the mountain to see the train she heard chugging by for her entire life. 

Thornton told writer Matt Bailey of themusicuniverse.com that, even though it’s not actually a Boxmasters tune, the group is known for the song because of Thornton’s earlier recording and his fan following. “We generally play ‘That Mountain’ in the encore because it’s an audience favorite,” he said.