Songwriter: Stories come out in music, novels, plays

By Stayton Bonner
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Saturday, April 19, 2008

'Most of us have been married lots of times, so we have lots of wife-in-laws," Jo Carol Pierce says about her Lubbock friends from childhood. "Those are permanent relationships unlike other contractual relationships. Jimmie Gilmore's wife, Janet, is one of my favorite wife-in-laws. A wife-in-law means you have both been married to the same person. Usually not at the same time."

Pierce's eyes smile from under her coiffed red hair. She has three ex-husbands.

"We're serial brides."

Although not as famous as Panhandle compatriots Joe Ely, Terry Allen, Jesse Taylor or ex-husband Jimmie Dale Gilmore, she should be. Pierce, who moved to Austin in 1972, recently released her second album, "Dog of Love," her first since 1995's "Bad Girls Upset by the Truth."

While the Lubbock men were working on their creative careers, their spouses were just plain working.

"Back in the '60s, my daughter wanted to get it straight. She asked me, 'It's only women that work, right?' " Pierce says with a laugh. "In my crowd, the men were pursuing their creativity and the women were supporting the families. I've always been a worker ant."

Pierce, now 63, didn't commit herself to writing — songs, plays, screenplays — until her mid-40s. By then, she didn't need to make anything up. Her deft eye and maturity gave the words weight. Pierce had lived her stories. You can hear it in the twang of her voice.

"One of my monologues is called 'Jim Henry Henley,' " Pierce says. "It's about a kid in Lubbock who loves to go fast and break things and fix them. He's got a '56 Ford with a Henley engine ... His dad calls him home to work on his farm because it's about to go under. The father is really depressed and his life is broken. But then his son comes up over this little rise and sees this Henley engine out there, this irrigation engine that's a Henley, and it ain't running right. So he strips his car and gives his father that engine."

Pierce had a personal connection she didn't even remember.

"I didn't really know that I'd written it for one of my favorite ex-husbands, Jim Henry Norman, until he told me, 'Thanks for writing that about me and my dad.' It hadn't been a conscious thing, but his story had been underlying my writing," she says. "I had juice for that, you know? It was one of those things that just falls out."

Lubbock lockdown

Pierce was born in Wellington, just off Route 66. After a stint in Washington state, her family moved to Lubbock.

"Growing up in Lubbock was like being in prison or something," Pierce says. "I understand they passed a leash law for cats. I really want to see how that's working out. I felt like I was a cat in a town with a leash law."

Isolated on the Caprock Plains, Pierce traveled via her radio.

"That was the first time I ever heard Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters, and I just went nuts," she says. "You could only get it in the middle of the night. That's when the mighty signals went out. It was around fifth grade. You'd be amazingly willing to go to bed on time and then turn on the radio and hold your ear against it all night long. ... It stole into your bedroom at night from this windy and sandstorming place where there was nothing as far as you can see."

Despite an initial aversion to performing live, Pierce had an early fling with showbiz. Her group, the National Washboard Jug Band, appeared on the Ted Mack amateur hour, a weekly variety show that held auditions across the country. Their 1967 performance, taped in Dallas, didn't win the audience vote.

"Mack insisted on putting a big band behind us," she says. "They came in on the wrong cue and ruined our little thing."

Pierce laughs.

"It was like the first 'American Idol.' After filming that, we all ran away to San Francisco and the first summer of love," she says. "That's where we were living when they actually showed the show. We lived right around the corner from Janis Joplin. She played every week at the Fillmore. We'd go every time. We were in another world."

A different path

Pierce and Gilmore had divorced before she left for California with their daughter, Elyse. While living on the West Coast, Pierce began working service jobs helping alcoholics and people with disabilities. After returning to Texas, she found employment with Child Protective Services in Austin. Pierce responded to distress calls. She knocked on doors, took children from abusive homes, worked to conciliate families and went to court dates. She often worked alone for 80 hours a week. Sometimes, people shot at her. The pay was minimal.

"It's kind of like being a 'grief mop.' I got that from a Nicolas Cage movie where he plays an EMS worker," she says. "I'm a smelly, stringy grief mop when I come out of work. It's a low-prestige job. But I come out feeling very happy and blessed. ... I'm exposed firsthand to just how unhappy life can be. It puts things in perspective for what a lucky dog I am."

Pierce now works at the CPS hot line. Several creative types work alongside her, including singer Janis Stinson and members of the heavy metal band Dax. Although they differ in musical styles, everyone shares a similar sense of humor and a sense of camaraderie.

"There's a lot of really dark, shocking and weird humor down there, as I'm sure there is at a lot of police stations," Pierce says. "You have to have that release and the togetherness of all laughing at something."

Pierce says it comes out in her writing.

"I want it to unsettle people and I also want it to be really funny," she says. "I never forget the kids that I work with. You're dealing with people when they're in their most raw and revealing. There's a job that needs to be done in a certain way for a real good reason. That keeps me going. And it's a lot less scary than writing or playing."

Back to music

In 1988, musician/filmmaker Troy Campbell had just moved to Austin from Ohio when he saw Pierce play at a small club called Chicago House.

"She was working on her play," he says. "I'd heard she was really funny. There were about three people watching while she did her performance. It was really awkward and beautiful. I was moved to tears by the end of it."

Campbell asked if he could buy a CD. Pierce didn't have one, so she went home and recorded songs on an old tape machine.

"In between them, she talked to me," Campbell says. "She said, 'This one's a girl song but it could be sung by a boy. Maybe that's what you want to do.' I played that tape for everybody I knew. It was great."

Campbell and musician/Texas Monthly writer Michael Hall admired Pierce but didn't think she was ready to record yet. Calling up friends like Joe Ely to perform her songs, they organized a tribute record and donated its proceeds to charity. The compilation, "Across the Great Divide: The Songs of Jo Carol Pierce," won record of the year and producers of the year at the 1993 Austin Music Awards. The album also founded a cult following for its subject. Two years later, Pierce released "Bad Girls," her own recording of songs and monologues.

Campbell was inspired by Pierce's fearlessness.

"She wasn't the greatest singer at the time, but her attitude was, 'Who cares?,' " he says. "It was about the poetry. There wasn't any fluff on 'Bad Girls.' It all hits pretty hard and holds up real well. ... She's like Tom Waits meets Loretta Lynn on a cross-country acid trip."

Happily ever after?

Throughout her life, Pierce has surrounded herself with artists and writers. Her "fourth and final playmate and husband," Guy Juke (a contributor to the Austin American-Statesman), is an artist and musician.

"I got married to Guy Juke and after that I didn't write for 12 years," Pierce says. "Which made him feel horrible. People would rag him about it. 'What are you doing to Jo Carol's writing? What's wrong?' ... Being happily married does interfere with my songwriting quite a lot."

Even though she wasn't writing music, Pierce continued working on plays and screenplays. Some of the latter were optioned, but none has been produced. Pierce recently began writing a novel.

"I just realized that it's going to take more than the rest of my life to finish it," she says.

As opposed to the lengthy time involved with writing plays or prose, songs offer an immediate result. Although her new record, "Dog of Love," is poignant like "Bad Girls," the songwriting is more mellow, loving and simplistic. It also showcases a more cohesive band sound. The closing track, "Life is Sweet," reflects a more content place:

"Life is short, life is sweet/ had the luck/ the chance to meet you/ and I knew I'd slipped into/ my own slipstream/ feels so true/ I been tuned to an unknown chord/ I been cut by an unknown sword."

Despite the pared-down lyrics, Pierce's writing still comes from complex emotional origins. Discussing the album's title track, she gives insight into her creative process.

"I wrote the song 'Dog of Love' when I was emotionally tattered, tore out, beat up, stomped down," Pierce says. "When I get like that, I want to be like somebody's dog that sits beside them, up against their leg. The person doesn't even notice the dog and just pets it absent-mindedly. You know, unconditional and very offhand love with very low expectations. I just think that would be lovely to be somebody's dog. It's sort of like this low level of being that I long for when I'm getting too over-stimulated or too tired. I was writing from that emotional state."

No matter the medium, Pierce maintains unnerving honesty as a storyteller.

"I asked David Halley one time, 'Do you know what you want a song to say before you write it?,' " Pierce says. "He said, 'No, but I know how I want it to make me feel.' "

She pauses and smiles.

"That's what I want for my songs, too."