Flashback: Mike Henderson, Country Music Made Me Do It

I start to shake, and I start to shiver, when I remember Mike Henderson’s 1994 RCA debut album Country Music Made Me Do It.

I start to shake with excitement when I recall the feral spirit running across the entire rough and ragged album.

I shiver with regret because the first single “Hillbilly Jitters” was pushed as a line dance number. It was lucky to peak at #69 on the charts. The video is odd in that its tries too hard to balance Henderson’s’ versatile eccentricity with his obvious mainstream Music City appeal. It feels like RCA wanted this single to keep company with Tracy Byrd’s “Watermelon Crawl.” It deserved to be unburdened by such imposed,  and low, expectations. An otherwise joyful and sincerely corny song is knee-capped by trying to make it cool with its own insipid and contrived dance move. I like to believe the song would have been better received on its own enthusiastic quirkiness alone.

That initial overreach may have done in Henderson’s burgeoning career as a solo country artist. The next two singles, “The Want To” and “If the Jukebox Took Teardrops” didn’t even chart. and Henderson was subsequently dropped from his record deal. In 1996, he would return to recording on Dead Reckoning, his own label he helped found.

Even if the Nashville music machine didn’t know what to do with an artist as comfortable playing bluegrass as he was the blues – Henderson referred to his guitar playing as “half Bill Monroe and half Muddy Waters” other Nashville players were paying attention to what he had created on this album. Marty Stuart would cover “Wishful Thinkin’ on his 2002 album Country Music. Both Travis Tritt and Trisha Yearwood would record “The Restless Kind.” Danni Leigh did an incendiary and pounding take “If the Jukebox Took Teardrops.” Patty Loveless included “Prisoner’s Tears” on her Mountain Soul II album.

This kind of attention from your peers on a failed album suggests Henderson’s songwriting was beyond the pale. That he was signed to EMI as a songwriter is evidence of it. He had for songs on Joy Lynn White’s 1992 debut Between Midnight and Hindsight. Later co-writing Chris Stapleton’s 2017 #1 hit “Broken Halo” and 2021’s “Starting Over” is proof of it. So was Adele covering “If It Hadn’t Been For Love.”

Henderson was also an accomplished musician. He initially game to Nashville in 1985 with the humble dream of playing in a star’s road band. He played the guitar, fiddle, mandolin, dobro, and harmonica with equal ease and fire. This virtuosity earned him membership on The Roosters, a roots rock band super-group that counted Kevin Welch, Harry Stinson, Gary Nicholson, and Glenn Worf among its members. Henderson was also a member of the edgy bluegrass outfit the Steeldrivers which claimed a young Chris Stapleton as its lead vocalist. As if he needed to do more, Henderson played a standing Monday night gig at The Bluebird Cafe for almost forty years with his blues band.

Henderson co-produced Country Music Made Me Do It with Blake Chancey, who worked with The Chicks on their first two albums.  The record’s appeal is how unpolished it sounds, which made it sound almost sloppy by comparison with Nashville’s more radio friendly output in the early nineties. Henderson’s songs sound like the amazing bar band you have discovered that you  want to share with all your buddies. It’s loose and loud. It has room to breathe and be playful. It is the difference between AM and FM radio. His guitar snarls and twangs while his vocals, that Bob Cannon described as a “field holler,” sound perfectly matched to his own material. Even the cover art is oddly laid back and relaxed, to the point of looking more discount than vintage. It doesn’t seem that Henderson cares. In fact, the seedy sincerity might just be the point.

Taking it all together, listeners can hear an audible, genuine love for country music on this collection of nine songs. Henderson emits a purity of spirit that sounds precisely like country music made him do it. This oddball album is the “snake-headed woman and two-headed crow” from the sideshow of ’90s Nashville.