Blue Highway

West Virginia singer-songwriter John Lilly ventures to Levittown, Pa., for a concert at Mom & Pop’s Coffeehouse.

By: Matt Smith
   Like countless other musicians before and since, John Lilly moved to Nashville in 1988 with hopes of country-music superstardom. Mr. Lilly found a day job as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame while he worked toward his big break.
   "Nashville — what an experience," says Mr. Lilly, who came to Music City, U.S.A., from North Carolina. "It was an education, and I met some wonderful people. I loved working at the Hall of Fame… I turned out to be really interested in the subject, and I got the chance to meet lots and lots of really well-known people — my heroes — Eddy Arnold, Kitty Wells and Harold Bradley.
   "The tour guides," he adds. "We were all in the same boat. There was not one person who went to Nashville to be a tour guide. They were either musicians or singers or songwriters or fledgling producers or whatever."
   Unfortunately, Mr. Lilly eventually had to supplement that minimum-wage gig by waiting tables in the evening. "That actually sounded the death knell," he says. "When I had to take two jobs, I really didn’t have time left to do justice to songwriting and showcasing and performing. After about three years, I was pretty burned out."
   Mr. Lilly moved back to North Carolina and continued to play music for a year, but soon headed on to West Virginia for "a regular day job with benefits" at the Augusta Heritage Center, a folk arts education program at Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, W. Va. He quit music for five years before starting an independent recording career in the late 1990s.
   "I kept waiting to get a record deal," he says, "and I finally realized it wasn’t worth waiting on any longer. I just didn’t realize the times had changed to the point where artists can put out their own music just as well."
   Mr. Lilly, who now lives in Charleston, W. Va., and works full-time as editor of West Virginia folklife magazine Goldenseal, is a musical "weekend warrior" who will journey to Levittown, Pa., for a Nov. 11 show at Mom & Pop’s Coffeehouse.
   The Illinois native has released a pair of solo CDs, Broken Moon (2000) and Last Chance to Dance (2003). Last year, the guitar-playing singer-songwriter turned his attention to a special project, re-releasing Blue Highway, a 1991 cassette he recorded with fiddler Ralph Blizard. In the 1980s and early ’90s, Mr. Lilly toured with Mr. Blizard’s old-time string band New Southern Ramblers, but the cassette featured a 1990 duo performance in Tennessee. Released earlier this year, the CD version also includes bonus tracks from a 1996 concert at the Augusta Heritage Center. Unfortunately, Mr. Blizard died late last year, just before Blue Highway hit the streets.
   "He was just a wild adventurer," says Mr. Lilly of Mr. Blizard "He was a traditional player who liked to play in the hinterlands with melody, always improvising and turning tunes inside out, having fun with them. We used to say, ‘He never played it the same way once.’"
   "He was a real inspiration," adds Mr. Lilly. "He was a great fellow with a wonderful sense of humor — just a warm, kind, generous soul and just a great man."
   Coincidentally, the title track from Blue Highway also received new life in 2005, winning the annual "Ghost Writers in the Sky" contest for original songs scribed in the style of Hank Williams Sr.
   "I wrote that song around the time I started to think about recording with Ralph," says Mr. Lilly. "Ralph, among his other strengths as a fiddler, had a real great feeling for the blues, and I’m pretty influenced by early country blues as well… I wrote this blues (number) to have a tune for me and Ralph to play together that was new and different, and it came out very much in the Hank Williams style."
   Mr. Lilly found out about the contest at the last minute and had to act quickly.
   "Somebody e-mailed me a link and said, ‘Oh, you probably already heard about this,’ and I was like, ‘No,’" he recalls. "I logged on and found out the deadline was Wednesday morning, and here it was midnight Monday. I went down to the basement with a cassette tape… and had to record a voice-and-guitar rendition of ‘Blue Highway.’ I did that at one in the morning, went to the post office and overnighted it — I got in just under the deadline."
   The song eventually went up against two other finalists in an online battle royale, with Mr. Lilly jumping out to an early lead and cruising home to victory. Last month, he performed the song at HankFest in Chicago, where he also got to play a full band set of Hank Williams tunes. Mr. Lilly was well-prepared for the latter task, as each New Year’s Eve he participates in a Hank Williams tribute in West Virginia in honor of Mr. Williams’ death in the state sometime between Dec. 31, 1952 and Jan. 1, 1953.
   Mr. Lilly promises a wide-ranging performance at Mom & Pop’s next week.
   "Well, I’m definitely going to do some original material," he says, "which is in the early or old-time country style for the most part, including the ‘Blue Highway’ song and other songs off my three recordings. I’ll do some Hank Williams for sure, and some Jimmie Rodgers, who’s my other big hero. I’m bringing along my mandolin, and I’ll accompany myself on the mandolin for a few old-time dance tunes, which are from all the years I played old-time music in square-dance bands and old-time string bands."
   The audience also should expect some "blue" yodeling in the vein of Williams or Rodgers.
   "That’s kind of a unique aspect of what I do," says Mr. Lilly. "I’ve got a song called ‘A Little Yodel Goes a Long Way.’ That’s one of my most requested songs over the years."
John Lilly will perform at Mom & Pop’s Coffeehouse, United Christian Church, 8525 New Falls Road, Levittown, Pa., Nov. 11, 8 p.m. Tickets cost $10 (suggested donation), $6 seniors/children. For information, call (215) 547-1124. On the Web: www.momandpops.org