My friend  Todd Brashear copied for me, a number of
years ago,  the  Newbury records contained herein. After about a
week, Todd asked me if I had listened and what I thought. I told him that
the records were just too much; they made me too sad, and I had enough
sadness in my life, and could not take what Newbury was dishing out. It
took me years to get my mind flipped, and ? m not sure I recognize where
I had been on those first focused listens. I don't really hear the sadness
now, at all.

At the end of the version of "She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye" on
the Live At Montezuma Hall record, I get a sense of devastation/exhilaration that
has lately got me wondering about the purpose of such moments. The song
is such a summing-up of things, in word, melody and performance, that the
first feeling that washes over me when the song ends is one of being cleansed.
Maybe like what we're supposed to feel about the crucifixion, but more acute.
Then the distance between the song's finish and our present increases and
increases and the burden is back upon the listener. We keep going, but this
song has made our life rock harder and pass more peacefully at one and the
same time. Going back into these records here collected, I find the freedom
of open space and slow-and-steady delivery of melody through a voice that is
very attentive to breath and strength and dynamic.

Looking into the life of Mickey Newbury, I find traits with which I am
both unfamiliar and uncomfortable. He plays golf, for example (although
now that I have learned that Burt Lancaster was, and Willie Nelson is, I may
find myself on the greens soon).  And apparently Newbury was something of
a gearhead, which I am decidedly not. And how can a gearhead do justice
to “His Eye Is On The Sparrow” so convincingly? Oh well.  “Heaven Help
the Child” is a beautiful song even though I don’t support the romance of
the lives of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and even wish that the verses were
excised and new ones writ to join the chorus.

David Allan Coe raped a song of Newbury’s, “If You See Her”, to write his 
“own” song called “In My Mind”. But Coe also introduced me to the work of 
Mickey Newbury through his recording of “The 33rd of August”, which hasn’t 
stopped blowing my mind in the 20 years since I first heard it.

There is concern expressed on the part of the family Newbury that
Mickey’s songs may get lost with the passing of his peers. His relative obscurity
during his lifetime is sobering, but there is no danger of losing Mickey’s 
music before the final holocaust.  It is too insistent, firmly and gently and
obstinately moving forward each time someone plays a track for his or her
own ears or for the ears of some other unexpecting sucker. Newbury’s songs,
and records, have such respect for the relationship of form to function; my
feeling is that they are so solidly built, with such integrity to themselves and
their purposes, that these songs and recordings will outlast most of the musics
that gain significant weightless praise.  And I think this matters to Mickey
Newbury; I believe he wrote for time that began before him and continues after him.