Flashback: Chris Knight, Chris Knight

After having been left fallow since 1973, MCA decided to bring the legendary Nashville branch of Decca Records back to life in 1994. By 1998, an impressive roster had started to grow at Decca Nashville. Rooted by veteran artists like Dolly Parton and Mark Chestnutt, the real show came from the scattering of young Decca hopefuls like Gary Allan, Lee Ann Womack, Rhett Akins, Rebecca Lynn Howard, Danni Leigh, Shane Stockton, and Chris Knight, whose careers were just coming into bloom.

Of the bunch, Chris Knight may have been the most unlikely candidate for Nashville stardom. A former civil servant for the state of Kentucky, Knight worked as an inspector for a state project dedicated to restoring the environmental damage caused by loosely regulated pre-WW II strip mining operations. He was a graduate of Western Kentucky University with a degree in agriculture. Born in St, Louis, Missouri in 1960, Knight was raised in tiny Slaughters, Kentucky from the age of five. He played with a toy plastic guitar as a kid before actually learning to play his brother’s real guitar. As a teen, he was playing for friends and family, He graduated to playing in local bars, but always maintained that music was just a hobby, something he pursued strictly for his own enjoyment. Knight said, “I was never really desperate to get into the music business.”

Nonetheless, the music business found him. In 1996, Knight recorded an eleven song guitar-vocal demo in his 10’x15′ foot Kentucky trailer that became legendary as it circulated through Nashville. Along the way it became known as The Trailer Tapes. In a 1998 No Depression feature, Grant Alden said, “…and the shorthand description is that it’s what might have happened had Steve Earle cut Nebraska.”

The observation is apropos as Knight first came to Nashville in 1991, largely inspired by the songwriting of Steve Earle and John Prine. When in Music City, Knight attended writer’s nights, eventually earning his way on to the Bluebird stage in 1992. That performance earned him a songwriting deal with Blue Water Music Corporation. He said, “And most everything I write – not everything I write – but all the stuff I write is just for myself. Nobody’s beating down my door to record my songs. So…I guess they just liked ’em anyways. They liked the songs for some reason or other, and wanted me to record them. So I didn’t have to convince anybody.”

Knight didn’t have to do the convincing because Decca A&R rep Frank Liddell was doing the selling to the Nashville brass on his behalf. It was Liddell who recorded The Trailer Tapes. Liddell said, “I thought it would be cool to get all that stuff on tape before he was a star.” Somehow Liddell sold Decca on recording a full album of songs written, or co-written, entirely by a vaguely misanthropic outsider who shared he loved to read Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, and John Steinbeck novels. Those literary influences bleed through Knight’s own compositions. Alden described Knight’s songs as “…short stories, plain, lyric glimpses into desperate lives, coiled violence, the cock-roach endurance of the stomped-upon and still hobbled working poor.”

Unfortunately, the jury is not out if Chris Knight ever became the Nashville star Decca and Liddell hoped he would become; he simply did not. Liddell proved painfully prophetic when he said, “I doubt very seriously that [radio’s] going to play him initially.” Turns out country radio didn’t play him initially, later on, or even ever really at all. Knight never charted a country single from any of his nine studio albums.

With his eponymous 1998 debut Chris Knight featured here, it is clear that that its lack of commercial success had little to do with the visceral grab and intensity of Knight’s vocals, his often desperate characters, and their messy lives. The album was recorded live with musicians like David Grissom, Richard Bennett, and Kenny Greenberg on guitars. Russ Pahl played steel. Chad Cromwell was on the drums. Glen Work was on bass.

As for the songwriting, when Knight wasn’t recording his solo compositions, he got to co-write with Craig Wiseman, Fred Eaglesmith, Sam and Annie Tate, and Dean Miller. You can touch the earth and feel the bluegrass soil in your mouth on these songs recorded from the ground up. Very little overdubbing or post-production work sounds like it was involved. Liddell said, “None of the songs were rewritten or sugar-coated so that we could possibly get air play. I mean, we cut what Chris Knight wanted to cut, for the most part. If somebody get’s killed in a song, they’re going to get killed in the song and that’s it.”

So perhaps not surprising the two singles, “Framed” and “It’ Ain’t Easy Being Me” did not find a home at country radio, even though the latter was later covered by John Anderson (Nobody’s Got It All ), Blake Shelton (Pure BS), and Jason McCoy (Sins, Lies and Angels). The most compelling songs are “Love and a .45,” “Something Changed,” and “William.” To my ears, “Summer of ’75” seemed to be the natural choice for his debut single which should have been followed by “House and 90 Acres.” Alden said, “But instead of his strikingly dark compositions [from The Trailer Tapes], we are left Knight’s more anthemic, ordinary tracks, paeans to small farmers and land, love, and losers.

The most conventional of his works (and this is still relative, mind you) are displayed here, songs that might brush up against Travis Tritt and not jump too far back into the shadows. Knight’s best songs are of the present, and most of what’s on his debut is like a memory painting, an idealized re-creation of the past.”

Even if that is the case, Knight’s ordinary re-creations still sound extraordinary compared to much of what was topping the country charts in 1998. Nobody else on a major label was offering these kind of rough and tumble vignettes populated with ragged characters from a rugged rural Kentucky landscape. These stories were unsettling. I don’t think you get to Cole Chaney, Ian Noe, Tyler Childers, and Sturgill Simpson without Chris Knight.

And mainstream Nashville acts eventually did come knocking on Knight’s door as well. Randy Travis (“Highway Junkie”), Lee Ann Womack (“You Lie When You Call My Name”), Confederate Rail Road (“I Don’t Want to Hang Out with Me”), Ty Herndon (“Love at 90 Miles an Hour”), Montgomery Gentry (“She Couldn’t Change Me”), Stacy Dean Campbell (“The Sound of a Train Not Running”), The Road Hammers (“The Hammer Going Down”), and Parker McCollum (“Enough Rope”) covered Chris Knight’s songs.

It’s unlikely Knight would have ever broken through with his own recordings at radio given his fiercely regional take on country music, but being dropped from Decca Nashville during the label restructuring shortly after his debut album was released all but guaranteed that.

Chris Knight remains one of the most unexpected and intense albums Nashville released in the 90’s.

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