Singer-songwriter Chris Knight lives in the real world, and that fact resonates in his songs. He may be on his second series of Nashville record and music-publishing deals, but his home remains a trailer on 40 acres in the ravaged Western Kentucky coal country outside of the small, aptly named town of Slaughters, not far from the Everly Brothers’ hometown of Central City and John Prine’s Paradise. The name of Knight’s hometown gives you an idea of the kind of people who populate his songs: struggling folks caught between the devil and the deep blues of another hangover, people for whom the highway can be either sweet escape or the road to hell.
Knight’s gift for turning America’s rural underbelly into something with literary heft and into melodies as immediate as a new best friend placed him in heady company on the release of his self-titled debut album in 1998. Comparisons to Prine, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle and Johnny Cash cropped up in publications like The New York Times, where the album was declared “the most striking, confident debut to come out of Nashville in years.” The fact that such an album even emerged from today’s squeaky-clean Music City machinery was surprising.
Little wonder, then, that when MCA Records condemned its Decca imprint, one of the few artists who might have redeemed Music Row from its current Wal-Mart blandness was left in the cold. For his part, Knight took it all in stride. “I wasn’t real disappointed or anything,” he says. “I wasn’t happy about it, but I thought that me being on a major label was a pretty big thing anyway. Like, man, I’m really lucky being on a big label. I almost felt like maybe I belonged on a little smaller label. Not that it was the wrong thing. I never really figured I would be a country star.”
Like a character in one of his songs, Knight reckoned he’d just pick himself up, dust himself off and carry on. “I figured I could go make an acoustic record the next week, just a solo record, and still get out and tour. Because a lot of my songs are written that way.” Knight is not exactly a stranger to the hard work on the lower rungs of the economic ladder; after all, he was a strip-mine inspector before his songs caught Nashville’s savvier ears.
If nothing else, Knight could always soothe himself with the balm of his lavish critical notices. “It kind of made up for not getting on the radio, and not selling a whole lot,” he notes.
Luckily, Knight didn’t need to go unplugged, or on his own. He landed another deal, this one with Dualtone, a new Music City indie label with a tasty roster that includes Radney Foster and Jim Lauderdale. Knight then promptly upped the artistic ante with his second album, A Pretty Good Guy. Produced by former Georgia Satellite Dan Baird, the disc is a finely wrought work that’s tinted with the sepia tones of the American heartland. Like Robbie Robertson with The Band or such contemporaries as Missouri’s blue-collar electric-guitar poets the Bottle Rockets, Knight casts the rock genre as the true modern province of the folk-music spirit.
Where do his melodic short stories come from? They’re drawn from the emotional landscapes of the folks around his hometown, and they’re “based on stories I know, and emotions and things I’ve done,” he says. “Or stories that I just think up in my headย If you’re in a certain mood and you’re writing a song, you can become somebody else for a while. If you’re pissed off, you can write a pissed-off song. That’s kind of where I come from in writing.”
The process started when Knight was 15 and his older brother brought home a guitar. While the brother worked the night shift in the mines, Knight taught himself chords from a book, and eventually worked up 50 Prine songs before starting to pen his own. He began composing in the classic fashion. “I always wanted to write but never could,” he recalls. “But it seems there was this girl I was seeing, and when we broke up, I wrote a song. When it ended, that night I wrote a song. It wasn’t that good, but from then on, I just started writing.”
Randy Travis, John Anderson, Confederate Railroad, Gary Allan and Montgomery Gentry all have covered Knight’s tunes, but he insists that he isn’t in the music game for the money. “I’m not going to write something that I don’t like. I’ve had this conversation with co-writers. If we can’t find something that we both like and are really enjoying writingย I’m not really hurting to write songs.”
Neither is he leaving his old Kentucky home for NashVegas. “I’m pretty attached to the area, I guess,” Knight explains on the phone from Nashville. “I get away enough. I wouldn’t want to leave and come back and not know the place. It’s cheaper to live up there, even with driving back and forth. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper. It’s slower-paced and everything. And I’d have to drag my wife down here.
“It’s quiet, and there’s a lot of things you can do. Have some friends over and cook something in the backyard. Ride horses. I want my daughter to know a bit about that: the country, the woods, the animals.”
Knight is still such a small-town boy that when he spotted Prine one day in Nashville, he shied away from approaching his idol as a fan and an apparent peer. “I saw him at the bookstore one day, but I didn’t holler at him or nothing. Somebody was bothering him while he was looking through the magazines, so I didn’t say anything to him.”
Yet for all Knight’s self-effacing small-town ways, he does have ambitions of an artistic nature. “I want to write songs that are considered great ten years from now,” he says.
As for right now, things are A-okay for this pretty good guy.
“I make my living off it as a songwriter and what have you. And I sure wouldn’t turn my back on Nashville, because I like Nashville, and everybody’s been real good to me. It’s been a real good thing for me writing down here,” he concludes. “I’m just trying to write songs, and I’ve had a few songs recorded. I really like getting songs recorded, and I’m real proud of it. I hope that I fit in pretty good, and at the same time I can go off and make these records the way I want to make them. So far it’s worked out real good.”
This article appears in Sep 13-19, 2001.