Just recently discovered this guy's music and really like it. I can't believe that I'd not heard of him before.

In looking into his history, he is regarded by many to be one of the greatest songwriters ever. Even John Prine and Kris Kristofferson stated that, and I find those two to be the best. I can hear alot of John and Kris in this guy's music, along with Tom Waits. Heck, even Waylon refers to him in Lukenbach, TX : " Between Hank Williams' pain songs and Newbury's train songs and "Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain"".

Good stuff if you're into this kind of music.

Thanks Gus - Just what I needed.
Great artist I have never met with my ears.

Yes, thanks for this. Kinda Prine, kinda Dylan or Waylon. Reading about Newbury, his own sordid C&W story to tell. He wrote "I Just Dropped In (To See What Condition my Condition is in" after a bad injury and hospital stay.

I heard he recorded frying bacon to mimic the sound of rain falling, you can hear it at the beginning of this song.
Great singer songwriter!

OZ

One of my all time favorite songs. Mr Newbury was talented far beyond his relatively unknown fame.
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Well, uh...
I have been a fan for a very, very long time.

One of the local TV stations where I grew up played "American Trilogy" each evening before signing off the air. A buddy of mine gave an old VHS tape of it. I was able to put it on youtube.

The quality is very, very poor at best but is the only one in existence.

Mickey Newbury - Channel 10 Sign Off

Mickey Newbury is probably more well known for a song that he arranged and didn't write. Elvis closed every performance with it.

From Joe Ziemer's biography of Newbury, "Crystal and Stone"...


Anyway...



Against this setting of social and political pandemonium, Elektra booked Mick at a new club in Hollywood, down the road from The Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard. “We were staying in Jac Holzman’s apartment in L.A. while Mick performed at the Bitter End West,” Susan stated. “Mick didn't know what he wanted to sing. We spent one entire rainy day sitting in the apartment while he played through every arrangement of every song that he was thinking about doing. He never went on stage with a planned set. He always let the 'spirit move him.’ He played three songs (Dixie...Battle Hymn of the Republic and All My Trials) that afternoon, but not together. He was pretty quiet, except for the music.”

Later that Saturday evening while backstage at the Bitter End, Mick was conversing with comedian David Steinberg about current headlines. Whites in integrated Southern schools, Mick explained, were insisting on using Dixie as the school-fight song, while blacks were protesting, as they saw it as an anthem of white supremacy. At the same time, the singing of Dixie had been banned in some Southern states, as a mistaken statement of the civil rights movement. Nothing in the song made it the exclusive property of bigots or extremists, Newbury protested. He then advised club manager Paul Colby he was going to sing Dixie, as a protest against censorship. Fearing a riot, Colby turned white and pleaded with him not to do it. Mick told him to call the riot squad.

“It was one of those kind of happening nights,” Mick said, “where everybody in the business comes in. Joan Baez was there and Odetta and Cass Elliott - bless her heart - and the Mamas and Papas.” “Streisand came by,” Susan remembered, “and tried to talk Kristofferson into leaving with her before Mick sang. Kris declined and my admiration for Kris jumped a notch.”

“Originally, Mick continued, “I intended to do (just) Dixie. It had the connotation of being a strictly Southern song that was associated with racism. I thought it was unfair so in the middle of the show I started to do Dixie.” “Everybody was holding their breath,” Susan recalled. “I was sitting next to Odetta, and I have to admit I turned a little green. What happened in the next seven minutes was magic.”

The Dixie Mick presented that evening was not the rousing, rebel yell, battle-march version, but the slow, heartfelt, melodious tune that we know today. Only by slowing it to a quarter-time ballad, could Mickey illustrate its true beauty and meaning. “I got through with the Dixie part of the song and I looked down and Odetta was sitting down in the front row and she had tears in her eyes.”

Only when he began singing Dixie, did it dawn upon him to add Battle Hymn of the Republic and conclude with the antebellum All My Trials. Mickey said, “Dixie just continued on, you know... the other two songs just happened to find their way in the song... and it wound up being a trilogy.” The impromptu arrangement just came together on that magical night and in one moment of brilliant inspiration.

“When I got through with that song, the place was like completely silent... Seemed like it went on for 30 seconds... And then I mean to tell you they stood and screamed and hollered like you would not believe... It was the most electrifying experience I ever had in music...”

Grateful a riot had been avoided, Colby would voice his recollection. “When he finished, he didn’t know if he was going to be applauded or if the stage was going to be rushed. The applause was thunderous.” And Susan would add the finishing touches, “By the end of the song, there was absolute silence in the club... not one clinking glass. Odetta was crying; Cass was crying, and then people were on their feet. A standing ovation that lasted at least two minutes. And that Newbury grin... he knew he could do it.”

“A lot of people,” Mick explained, “were not aware that President Lincoln requested Dixie to be performed on the steps of the White House the day the Civil War was over. Historically, it goes a long way back... and it was written by a man (D.D. Emmett) from the North of the United States... Battle Hymn of the Republic was written by a man from the South. I know the song was written for a Broadway play. (Actually, music for Battle Hymn is actually credited to a Southerner from South Carolina, William Steffe in 1856. The lyrics were re-written in 1861 by Julia Ward Howe, a northern Transcendentalist from Boston, as a poem to compliment Steffe’s infectious melody.) And All My Trials was initially a Jamaican slave song... It was called All My Sorrows.”

“African-American slaves of the era adopted All My Trials as a song of sorrow. The Confederacy took Dixie as a marching song, while the Union identified with Battle Hymn of the Republic... So there were the three components of the Civil War.” In four minutes and fifty seconds, Mickey wove them into An American Trilogy, eternally bonding minority, Southern and Northern issues into a common lament; and in so doing, he helped diminish the Mason-Dixon Line.

“I just put together songs from three separate factions in the Civil War, to show that they were all really fighting for the same thing,” Mick told Disc. “It’s not my triumph though,” he humbly added. “It’s the beauty of the songs.”

Since that magical night, An American Trilogy has become one of the most interpreted pieces in history with approximately 500 cover versions (as of February, 2011), ranging from the London Symphony Orchestra to Elvis Presley’s glitzy Vegas production, eagle cape and all. At the end of 1999, some 600,000 people in the U.K. selected Presley’s version of Trilogy as the number one American song of the millennium. That survey - a joint effort undertaken by HMV, Channel 4 and Classic FM - required 12 months to complete. And in 2008, a crowning benediction, England’s Whitehaven Male Voice Choir performed The Trilogy for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

As An American Trilogy binds Southern, Northern and minority issues into a common lament, the song has come to be revered by opposing factions. Popularity has transformed it into a people’s anthem. The song, Brian Hinton wrote, has become “the ultimate example of Americana. It somehow evokes the birth of modern America.” From Australia to South Africa, the song has also become a pillar in the repertoire of male voice choirs and church groups.