Even among his storied peers kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson Townes Van Zandt the songs of Mickey Newbury were legend as soulful and sophisticated as their writer was unassuming enigmatic Today, reissues of his three clasic albums underline his genre-crossing greatness. He brought a whole new dimension to country music discovers Will Hodgkinson.

Portrait by Con Hill.

IT WAS, ALL WHO KNEW HIM AGREE, the very essence of Mickey Newbury. In 1969, recording his mellow heartbreak masterpiece Looks Like Rain in a converted garage studio on the outskirts of Nashville called Cinderella Sound, the Houston, Texas-born songwriter decided his album would benefit from the sound of crickets. Newbury had found other incidental sounds, including pouring rain and passing trains, on an album by the Mystic Moods Orchestra, but crickets were proving elusive. So he bought a jar of them from a nearby fishing bait store, held them up to the microphone, and waited for the orthopteran insects to do their thing. Unfortunately the crickets suffered a bad case of red light fever, the terror that can hit any musician the moment the producer presses the record button. They simply wouldn’t chirrup.

“Then Mickey said: ‘How about we put them in the echo chamber?’” remembers Wayne Moss, the Nashville guitar legend who set up Cinderella Sound in 1962 and continues, aged 87, to run it to this day. “We put a jar of them in there. They still wouldn’t co-operate.”

“Mickey put those crickets in the echo chamber and shut the door,” remembers Charlie McCoy, the guitar and harmonica ace who helped set up Cinderella Sound. “All we got was static.”

“That’s when Mickey said: ‘I know, I’ll let ’em loose,’” continues Moss. “Well, we got the chirrups. We also got the crickets’ children and grandchildren. They’re running around that echo chamber to this day, which is a problem for me. Turns out most people don’t want crickets on their albums.”

Perhaps it’s for the best. According to Mickey Newbury’s widow Susan, the Cinderella Sound echo chamber occupies a former septic tank in the yard.

MICKEY NEWBURY WAS A POETIC figure with a tough past who set the template for the outlaw country movement, a guiding light for Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Townes Van Zandt. Most famous for An American Trilogy, the 1971 medley of 19th-century folk songs that became a staple of Elvis Presley’s Las Vegas shows, he was also a Nashville legend who never kowtowed to the Music City establishment, a mellifluous singer who never craved fame, a disciplined songwriter whose lengthy, low-key compositions, influenced by gospel, beat poetry and early R&B, fitted into no obvious radio format. His three-album run of masterpieces, 1969’s Looks Like Rain, 1971’s ’Frisco Mabel Joy and 1972’s Heaven Help The Child, brought a new level of introspection and complexity into the country music world.

As Kristofferson wrote in the linernotes to Looks Like Rain, the songs sound “like the ancient echoes

from a forgotten past… the dark mystery of space.” Or, as Newbury himself told Ben Fong-Torres of Rolling Stone magazine, “I don’t consider myself that much of a country artist.”