Songwriter David Olney pens tales of Americana

There's a clip on YouTube of a young Steve Earle onstage sometime in the early '90s, his long hair pulled into a loose ponytail, strumming an acoustic guitar and telling his audience about David Olney.

"He's one of the best songwriters in the world," Earle says. He's about to play Olney's heartbreaking "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning." "It's one of the most perfect songs I've ever heard."

Accolades like that are common for Olney, who performs with fiddle player Ward Stout at the White Water Tavern in Little Rock on Wednesday.

"Olney's place in the pantheon of Nashville songwriters is secure," wrote Skip Anderson in a 2014 Nashville Scene profile.

He was one of the first to drive a stake in Americana soil -- too country for folk, too folk for country, with a little rock 'n' roll mixed in for good measure. The great Townes Van Zandt placed Olney's songwriting alongside Mozart, Lightnin' Hopkins and Bob Dylan.

His songs have been recorded by Emmylou Harris and Del McCoury, among others. He has recorded more than 20 studio albums and EPs and released several live records, including this year's Holiday in Holland with guitarist Sergio Webb.

"It's a perfect fall day," Olney says from the Nashville, Tenn., home he shares with wife Regine. He grew up in Rhode Island, went to college in North Carolina, lived in Atlanta for a bit and finally made his way to Nashville, where he has lived for the past 43 years.

"I'd been playing music for a while and had started writing songs. I had maybe 10 songs and it was time for me to make a move if I was going to do music. I had to go to a place where that was an industry."

The availability of friends' couches made the country music capital more appealing than New York or Los Angeles, he says. And hearing the work of another songwriter who was equally hard to pin down helped.

"At the time, Kris Kristofferson was making his mark and I had a record of his," Olney, 68, recalls. "Up until then I had thought Nashville was full of people with rhinestone suits and cowboy hats. But the songs that Kristofferson wrote made me think that this might be the place to go."

He spent the early '80s fronting The X-Rays, a hard-hitting roots-rock outfit that scored a gig on Austin City Limits in 1982. By 1986, he released his solo debut, Eye of the Storm. Deeper Well followed in 1988 and attracted the attention of Harris, who covered the title track and the song "Jerusalem Tomorrow." Linda Ronstadt also tackled the song "Women Across the River."

"It's a big deal," Olney says of other artists picking up on his songs, which have also appeared on the TV series Nashville. "I'd like to think that the garage band down the street doing a song of mine is a great compliment and a real honor, but when it's very public, when it's Emmylou Harris, it validates a lot of years of not being known and just scuffling. It validates the decision that you made to be a songwriter."

His songs are often character- and story-driven, which is his preferred way to write.

Songwriting today, he says, "is much more self-absorbed. When I came to Nashville, myself and others, we would try to write story songs. That meant getting out of myself a little bit. I always just liked making up people and catching on to their coattails."

His last studio album was 2014's When the Deal Goes Down, and a follow-up should be just around the corner.

He says, "I'm putting the finishing touches on an album I'm doing with a Canadian fellow, Brock Zeman."

Olney and Zeman crossed paths in Nashville and the idea of collaborating seemed perfectly natural. Zeman worked on some tracks Olney had sent him and the two eventually got together in Zeman's rural studio in Ottawa to flesh out the songs.

"It's fun to find somebody who has a studio and interact with them. It takes a bit longer, I think, but the idea of collaborating with someone appeals to me." Look for a spring release, Olney says.

Style on 11/29/2016