Living And Laughing

Ask Ray Wylie Hubbard to tell an Arkansas story, and he’ll gladly oblige.

So, how about the one with the guitar in the planter?

Well, he was driving through an Arkansas town - it was about 10 years ago, so he’s not sure which town anymore - and stopped at a gas station. In the corner of the store was a guitar neck buried in a planter. When Hubbard asked the attendant about the guitar, the shop owner, in a moment of true Southern hospitality, offered it to the veteran songwriter.

Hubbard, of course, accepted.

The store owner went a step beyond, mailing Hubbard a box with the spare parts to what was once a 1932 Regal resonator guitar.

“Three weeks later, the bottom half came in the mail,” says Hubbard by phone.

Hubbard then shipped the parts to a friend, who assembled them into a functional guitar. Not just functional, Hubbard boasts.

“I love that guitar. It’s all over the record.”

The record Hubbard speaks of is his soon-to-be-released “The Grifter’s Hymnal,” a 12-song collection due March 27. It finds the veteran artist with the amplifiers up, playing a series of roots rock songs inspired by both Hubbard’s advancing age - he’s 65 and thinking about his own mortality, he says - and his desire to move forward as an artist.

His new album will start a new round of tour dates, and the new tunes take him in a slightly different direction than previous works.

“It’s got an old-school rock ’n’ roll vibe,” Hubbard says of the album. “I had the ideato write this record and be completely fearless.”

The album was recorded with a full backing band and features a few guests, too, such as former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, who contributes vocals on a new version of “Coochy Choochy,” a song Starr wrote as a B-side for his 1970 “Beaucoups of Blues” single.

Hubbard could tell stories about how he and Starr became friends but, maybe that should wait until the release of the former’s memoirs, a collection of road tales and humorous anecdotes the Oklahoma native andAustin, Texas, resident has collected over his more than 40-year career.

The memoir is about 80 percent complete, Hubbard says. It’s a combination of “Huckleberry Finn” - he would be that troublemaker - running through the “Matrix,” or something like that, he says.

Considering his humble Oklahoma roots, “I’m pretty amazed at where I am,” he says.

Hubbard is not racing to get to the end, either of his memoir or his creative output. His new album employs a slightly refinedsound, and Hubbard has recently paired with neooutlaw country songwriters such as Hayes Carll and taken to Twitter to share his music with a new generation.

“I don’t think of myself as a nostalgia act,” he says. “I don’t want to live in the past.”

He does explore it from time to time as he writes the memoir. Hubbard, a laugh peppering his remarks, says that kind of introspection has taught him something.

“I don’t have any laurels, but if I did, I wouldn’t rest on them.”

Now that sounds like the start of another good story.