Wearing an embroidered, pearl snap, western shirt, her father’s Martin acoustic guitar lovingly cradled in her hands – with it’s waist resting on an upper thigh clad in worn jeans she wore in high school, Joy White looks upwards, making serious eyes with anyone who dare listen to her incendiary honky-tonking from the music inside the cover of her 1992 Columbia debut album Between Midnight & Hindsight.
Marty Stuart was one of those listening and making eyes back. In the liner notes of that first album he said, “The first time I hear Johnny Cash, it changed my life. The first time I heard Emmylou Harris, I fell in love, (But) the first time I heard Joy White, I had my bus driver pull over. I got on the telephone and called everyone I could think of in Nashville and told them ‘I just heard a redhead that has a voice that could make time stand still’.” Odds are Stuart had been listening to one of the many demos White had been recording since first arriving in Nashville back in 1982. Between Midnight & Hindsight consisted on songs pulled from her demo work from the past decade.
Some of White’s hindsight must have come in midnight’s shadow on Music Row because she once said, “It was a stupid thing to do,” she says now. “I would not suggest that to any young girl. But of course, when you’re young, you know everything. I had no fear. I just took off and went for it.”
Stay with her sentiment of going for it, and just follow the sound of her voice here. When White first came to Nashville she said, “It was a completely different town; it was always first about being a really good singer and singing great songs.” White has always maintained that she has always been a perfectionist when it comes to her singing. She had been doing it since she was five years old as the lead vocalist of Indiana’s “Singing White Family featuring Little Lynn White,” performing every Sunday. Family lore has it that by the age of one she was singing along to every song on the radio. “To the T and on key” according to White.
It all tracks. Her father was a guitar player from West Memphis, Arkansas and her mother a singer from eastern Tennessee. As she grew up near South Bend, Indiana, she started playing in garage bands in The Hoosier State. “I want my vocals to be in tune, the harmonies to be good,” she said. Against her will, she would have Lynn added to her Nashville stage name to help differentiate her from other new female artists at the time, as if anyone else came close to sounding like either Joy White or Joy Lynn White. Her vocal skills stood alone, head and shoulders and heart and soul above the competition.
And even if Nashville was right, and somehow her crazy good and powerful singing on her debut album wasn’t sufficiently attention-grabbing, the songwriting was there to rattle your cage with a bunch of hard-hitting songs. Mike Henderson has four big sounding co-writes here, two with Wally Wilson and two with Mark Irwin. She covers a Kostas-Marty Stuart composition and one written by Kevin Welch and Harry Stinson (honestly, where doesn’t Harry Stinson show up when talking country music from the golden era?). She gets to perform Bobby Braddock’s “Why Do I Feel So Good” along with two of her own co-writes. Throw in Richard Leigh’s “Cold Day in July”, later famously recorded by the Chicks, and it is awesome collection of songs. If there can be a complaint about this showcase, it is that producers Blake Chancey and Paul Worley struggled to make it hang together as an album, as a cohesive artistic statement.
But, hey, hey, mama, doesn’t she still take flight here? The album alternately smoulders and soars. It is one of those rare and special first listening experiences. Years later, I still feel the impact reverberating in my guts. A smile still slips across my face, and that memory is for good reason. Speaking several years after this debut, White said, “…if you give me a chance, I’ll knock ’em dead. I’ll step up to the plate every time; I’m an experienced singer.” In the liner notes, Holly Gleason said, “ What’s truly amazing is Joy White’s versatility. She can dig in and growl and she can kick back and sing with a purity of tone that recalls no less than Emmylou Harris’ early work.”
Naturally, such excitement and artistic virtuosity across the entire project had to be met with commercial disappointment. Maybe because Nashville could do no better than compare her with Dwight Yoakam at the time. Music City would continue to unsuccessfully leverage that same tired reference point with past Flashback-featured artists George Ducas, Bob Woodruff, and Danni Leigh alone. Wanda Jackson or even Bobbie Gentry may have made more sense in the case of Joy White, but as real as those comparisons might have been they wouldn’t realistically help move any product in 1992. So Dwight Yoakam it was.
Even then, Columbia could neither promote nor push her two singles into the top thirty. Her first single, “Little Tears,” stalled at #68. “True Confessions” would peak at #45. “Cold Day in July” would shiver and freeze at #71. Her second album Wild Love would produce two singles that fared no better. Lynn was dropped from Columbia while recording her third album. Her 1997 Lucky Dog album The Lucky Few its own wondrous discovery to make,
But she first gave us this gift. White is not bitter about her major label experience in Nashville. She said, “I’m OK with all of this now. I think…I think I was made to do what I have done in my life. She said, “I have to remember that I got into it because I am a singer and that’s what God made me.”
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