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Entertainment > Terri Hendrix
Terri Hendrix
Friday, April 18, 7:30 PM
WaMu Stage
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A Featured Entertainer in our Music on MAIN presented by WaMu series!
If you’re inclined to learn anything at all about Terri Hendrix, all you really need to do is listen to "Acre of Land" — the centerpiece de resistance of her ninth and latest album, The Spiritual Kind. In a little under four minutes, you’ll come away with more than just the perfect introduction to the San Marcos, TX-based songwriter’s music at its absolute best. You’ll have a veritable map of her heart and a soul, a keen understanding of the philosophy by which she lives her life, and even the secret to her success as a wholly independent businesswoman.
To grow a garden / You’ve gotta have patience
You need to work in it every day
Mother Nature will give you the most resistance
But you can turn it into something anyway …
The garden metaphor carries over into the second verse: "Some throw seeds and cross their fingers/Some plant what they want in a row." And if her thumb "was just a little bit greener," she reflects, well, she’d surely have everything figured out by now. But she’s not afraid to ask questions, speak her mind freely enough to occasionally put her foot in her mouth, learn from her mistakes and sometimes — from the top, with feeling — repeat them all over again. And as the chorus reveals, she’s got a firm grip on the key to survival, be it in life or the music business: Find and nurture your own "acre of land," and, come hell or high water, stand your ground. "I’ve been through the fire/I’ve been through the flood," she sings in the final verse, "The sun beats me down, but I get back up."
The song is a tribute to Marion Williamson, the late philanthropist and gifted musician who took Terri under her wing in the 1990 and, as the oft-told Terri tale goes, gave the aspiring songwriter guitar lessons in exchange for goat-milking farm chores. But Marion taught her young protégé a great deal more than an appreciation for Mississippi John Hurt-style finger picking; she instilled in Terri the strength of will and confidence to weather storm after storm on her way toward building one of the most successful DIY music careers this side of Ani DiFranco. Marion died of cancer in 1997, less than a year after Terri self-released her debut album, Two Dollar Shoes. But 10 years and eight albums later, Terri insists that her late friend still finds ways to guide her. She named her record label Wilory Farm, after Marion’s own several acres of land. She follows the motto; "Own your own universe" — and does, being one of very few recording artists who can proudly claim to own all of their masters.
The songs themselves reveal a leap in confidence, too. Stylistically, The Spiritual Kind is typically — by Terri standards — all over the map, jumping deftly from folk to pop to blues to swinging jazz with the anything goes, free-range eclecticism of her live shows. But even her most seasoned fans are in for a few surprises. "The way we approached the record was, anything that we’ve kind of done structurally in the past, we just tried to deviate from that," says Terri. "There’s not one song on here that has a pattern that we’ve done before. The idea was to venture into new territory."
Case in point: "Jim Thorpe’s Blues," saved for late in the record, like a live show’s dizzying, pre-encore climax. Arguably the catchiest song she’s ever written, it’s also one of the most probing and socially charged; clearly, she’s picked up more from Woody Guthrie in recent years than the fierce cover of his "Pastures of Plenty" that graces the first half of the record. Unlike "Acre of Land," "Jim Thorpe’s Blues" probably would have sounded right at home on The Art of Removing Wallpaper — except that Terri admits she could never have written it two years ago.
"I wouldn’t have even known how," she laughs. "But I know more of what I want in my songs now. I feel really proud of ‘Jim Thorpe’s Blues’ because I worked really hard on that song, wanting to achieve a certain goal, and I wasn’t going to settle for anything less. When I started writing it, it was more factual, more like a biography. But I didn’t want it to sound like a book report. What fascinated me most about Jim Thorpe’s story in the first place was why was I unaware of not only him, but also the fact that his daughter was fighting to keep nuclear waste from being buried on Indian land? That’s what really struck a chord with me, and I wanted to personalize the song to reflect these issues.
"For me, that’s really what makes this record different," she continues. "It’s about awareness, and it’s a tribute to things and people that too often go overlooked." For Terri, that means people like Jim Thorpe, or the migrant workers in "Pastures of Plenty." It’s friends and mentors like Marion and Lloyd, and Austin jazz cat Stanley Smith, whom Terri thanks in the album-closing "Mood Swing" with the same reverence as Anita O’Dea, Louis Prima and John Coltrane. And it’s people like guitarist Jesse Taylor and club owners Clifford Antone and C. B. Stubblefield, three late greats of the Texas music scene who collectively inspired more people from the side of (or behind) the stage than any legendary household name. Fittingly, all three are honored in The Spiritual Kind’s title track.
"The people that have mattered the most to me in my life and career have been those that are spiritually based," she says. And "the spiritual kind," she explains, are those who strive to sow more joy than sorrow on their own acre of land, and, however possible, share their harvest with the world. By that definition, Terri’s thumbs are a lot greener than she gives herself credit for. "For the past 15 years, my life has revolved around the discovery of music, and the joy of music," she concludes. "And to get the opportunity to do what I do for my living ... how beautiful is that?"