Lee Ann Womack: If It Feels Real

Lee Ann Womack has been living in Nashville since she moved there in the mid-1980s to attend Belmont University. But she was born and raised in tiny Jacksonville, Texas, and still considers herself an East Texan. She and her husband, producer Frank Liddell, still have property in that area and in Houston, where he grew up.

So it wasn’t a stretch for her to choose Houston’s renowned SugarHill Recording Studios to track her latest album, The Lonely, The Lonesome & The Gone, which showcases her supple voice on 14 originals and covers rooted in blues, gospel, soul and country.

Womack returned to her Texas origins because, she says, that’s where she was “full of dreams and full of hope and full of country music.”

“I feel that way when I go back there,” she adds, “and I wanted that feeling.” 

She also wanted to remove her band from the “Music Row mindset” — mainstream Nashville’s emphasis on making commercial, radio-friendly music.

“I wanted them to understand that is not a factor,” she explains. “We wanted to make music for the sake of making music. When you get off of Music Row, you start to feel that.”

Womack essentially got off Music Row when she left MCA Nashville in 2012, choosing to exit rather than add more commercial-sounding tracks to an album Universal Music Group Nashville head Luke Lewis had encouraged her to record in 2010, before he was replaced during Universal’s merger with Capitol/EMI. She was able to walk away with that album, The Way I’m Livin’, which she finally released in 2014 on Sugar Hill Records. The disc made several year-end top-10 lists, and earned a 2015 Grammy nomination for Best Country Album, followed by a 2016 Best Country Solo Performance nod for her cover of Hayes Carll’s “Chances Are.” It also drew her into the Americana fold, among artists largely uninterested in kowtowing to major-label demands.

Recording its follow-up in, say, Buddy Miller’s home studio wouldn’t have worked because she and the band still would have run into industry types anywhere they went. Plus, there’s a lot to be said for recording George Jones’ “Please Take The Devil Out Of Me” in the very same spot where he crooned the original.

Her twangy, Dollyesque version, which leans toward country & western (there is a distinction), was, ironically, inspired by Port Arthur, Texas blues belter Janis Joplin. Because Womack listened only to country growing up (her dad was a country-radio DJ), she didn’t really know Joplin’s work — until a friend brought over a bunch of albums to spin on the big, console-style record player she’d just acquired.

“He played ‘Mercedes Benz.’ I was like, ‘God, that girl is an East Texan. She sounds just like me,’” Womack recalls. “It sort of brings it all together, for me anyway; it’s all so similar. And the soul that she has is the same soul that George Jones has … It was an inspiration, just as far as East Texas and all the different vibes that go on there musically.

“I believe a lot in vibe,” Womack adds.

She also believes in supporting younger and lesser-known artists, as she did during AmericanaFest by inviting a parade of talents, from John Fullbright and Amanda Shires to John Paul White, the Secret Sisters and Jamey Johnson, onstage during a Music City Roots event billed as Lee Ann Womack & Friends. And for The Lonely, The Lonesome & The Gone, she and Liddell gathered a batch of upstart players that included drummer Jerry Roe, son of producer Dave Roe, and guitarists Ethan Ballinger, who plays with her daughter, Aubrie Sellers; Alan Jackson’s nephew Adam Wright; and Waylon Jennings’ grandson Waylon Payne, son of Sammi Smith and Willie Nelson guitarist Jody Payne.

Wright co-wrote the aching title ballad with Jay Knowles, and wrote or co-wrote six other tracks.

Even recording to old-school analog tape and performing classics such as “Long Black Veil” and ”He Called Me Baby,” he and the others injected new life into the proceedings, Womack says. “Baby” takes on a funky gospel feel in their hands; “Veil” is rendered in a stripped-down, elemental form.

“A musician like Ethan Ballinger … he’s very, very young, and so a lot of things are new to him,” she says. “They also are unaffected by current trends, what’s going on now on Music Row, because it’s not something they turn on and turn off; it’s really a part of their life.

“They don’t think like the average Nashville cat,” Womack continues. Instead of steering the ship in different directions, she adds, “They’re building the ship from the ground up.”

But whether she’s recording a classic or singing a song written by one of her daughter’s contemporaries, Womack’s criteria are the same. “If it feels honest to me, and it feels real and it moves me,” she says, “then I figure it’s gonna move somebody else.”

This article appears in our January/February edition, on newsstands January 10.