Radney Foster is heading, as the folks in Firesign Theatre used to say, “forward into the past,” using his current tour as an opportunity to revisit the album Del Rio, TX 1959, which was released 30 years ago. It was that record – named for his place and year of birth – that produced four hit singles and established Foster as a solo artist after performing for several years as a member of the duo Foster and Lloyd. So, looking back, how is the guy who will be performing Del Rio on Thursday, June 29, at the Mucky Duck different from the guy who recorded the album all those many years ago?
“Wow,” says Foster, speaking from the road in North Carolina. “I think of myself back then as a kid, but I was a grown man, 32 years old, and a father. But 30 years on, there’s so much about life that resets your meters. Not only your expectations, but your ambition for what you’re trying to do. I knew I was trying to write a stone-cold country record to the best of my ability. I also knew that I wanted there to be the kind of depth that would not only please myself, but the mentors that I was hanging out with.”
“I could have given a shit if I had impressed a record executive, but man, if Guy said you had a good song, that was the full-tilt seal of approval right there.”
And who might those be? “Townes, Guy and Rodney.” That would be heavyweights Van Zandt, Clark and Crowell. “I could have given a shit if I had impressed a record executive, but man, if Guy said you had a good song, that was the full-tilt seal of approval right there.”
Some official bios say that Foster wrote his first song when he was 14, but he says that was actually not the case. “I was disabused of that by my mother. She has lyrics – which I probably wrote to the tune of “Jesus Loves Me” or whatever – she has them from when I was seven, writing songs in Sunday school.”
Foster was raised on the border, in a musical family. “Both parents sang in the choir in church,” Foster says. “And we had a piano. There weren’t any great piano players in our home, but if somebody came by, they could play it. My dad played guitar and sang. The funnest nights in our home were the Saturday nights that somebody brought the barbecue, somebody brought the beer, somebody brought the potato salad, and everybody brought an instrument, and they played in a circle on the back porch.”
“It didn’t matter if it was Fats Waller, Elvis or Hank Sr. or Patsy Cline. If it had a few chords that they could figure out, and they thought it was a cool song, they were going to play it,” Foster recalls.
Growing up in Del Rio, Foster was right in the middle of two intertwined cultures. “I grew up in a bilingual home,” Foster says. “Four generations on the border, and my father was adamant that you couldn’t make a living if you didn’t speak Spanish. Watching guys playing mariachi and huapango songs in the corner of a bar across the river was a very easy thing to get to do. So being surrounded by Mexican, Hispanic and Latino culture – that’s actually three separate things – if that had not been there, I don’t know that I would have written ‘Raining on Sunday.'”
Kudos from Guy Clark aside, how do you know when you’ve written a good song? “When you pick it up two weeks or a month later, and it really still rings true,” Foster says. “When you play it in front of audiences, and you watch them suck in their breath at some point during the song. Or the applause that goes with that. And sometimes it’s not until you’ve recorded it, and then a couple of decades later, people are still coming up to you and talking about the impact that a song had on them, how it changed their life.”
Being a Texas guy, Foster has played a gig or two in Houston. “When I was in Foster and Lloyd, we did a tour with Carl Perkins. We opened, and then Carl [went on]. We played Fitzgerald’s with Carl Perkins, and that was a pretty cool night. He got us to sing with him on “Honey Don’t” every single night. That and “Matchbox Blues,” so that was really fun, singing the Everly Brothers parts on those songs.”
Since the Mucky Duck is such, as they say, an intimate venue, how is a show there different from one in a big room? “There’s a little more storytelling, or some asides that are funny, about life on the road. I’ve played the Duck for years,” Foster says. “For decades. It’s one of my favorite places to play. I try to go back and play at least once a year. I just love that place.”
Radney Foster will play a show featuring his album Del Rio, TX 1959 on Thursday, June 29, 7 p.m. at McGonigel’s Mucky Duck, 2425 Norfolk. Tickets are $80, and a live stream of the concert will also be available. For more information, visit mcgonigels.com.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
