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 Kent
Agee: the short story
"In
the beginning was a red-dirt road, purple iris and a crawdad
hole....."
That’s the truth. My earliest memories are of life on Pleasant
View Lane in rural Indiana, and of family reunions on my father’s
side where relatives, mostly born in eastern Kentucky, told
stories that I’d heard before and somehow made them sound
new. At those family reunions a stage would be set up and everyone
played, no fan fair, no introductions, just a language everyone
spoke. I watched and believed that we all shared some kind of
powerful secret. A secret that was joyful and sad and sustaining.
Ever since I’ve been trying to wring that secret out of
the air through almost accidental combinations of chords and
words and melody, by staring into circumstances and memories
and the frail beauty of human weakness and intention.
My great-grandfather, Draper Walters, was a Kentucky fiddle
player. He was cutting records in the 30’s. He moved to
Indiana because he killed a man in a bar fight. I have a dim
memory of him playfully tapping his cane at me. I found his
fiddle in the attic when I was twelve, it had a rattle-snake
rattle inside. My grandfather, Ray Agee, was a banjo and stand-up
bass player. He had his own radio/variety show, "Ray Agee’s
Home Folks Party" through the 40’s. He had a schoolboy
crush on my Grandmother until the day he died. I wrote "Omens
of the End" on his banjo. My father, Chuck "Kukie"
Agee, was a jazz/rockabilly guitar player. He owned a music
store all through my youth and I used to sit behind the counter
playing and listening all day.
I started as a rock musician. Well that's not quite true, I
started as a kid who thought too much, then suddenly I was a
married nineteen-year-old, then I was a father and built lawnmowers,
then I was a machinist, a grain-elavator worker, a divorced
department store salesman, then I went to college with my two
children, after that I was a carpenter. All the while I played
music and tried to find or wind a common thread of who I was
through what I wrote. Somewhere in there I moved to Nashville
and signed with Warner-Chappell as the writer/lead singer for
my rock band, "Jane, His Wife", a band somewhere between
Pearl Jam and Roxy Music. We had a buzz going for a while and
were courted by labels but somehow never put out a cd. During
that period I was running pretty much on inspiration, naiveté
and testosterone.
After Jane broke up I began writing every day, songs to pitch
to other artists mostly. Perhaps because my father came from
jazz, my grandfather from traditional country, my great-grandfather
from appalachian music and I from rock I’ve never felt
constrained by style. So as a song writer, under contract with
Sony/ATV, then with Lucky Daddy Music and now RPM/Windswept
Publishing, I've been lucky to have had cuts by artists as diverse
as Barbra Streisand, Vanessa Williams, Engelbert Humperdinck,
Evan & Jaron, Andy Griggs, Sherrie Austin, Rhett Aikins,
and Tom Keifer (of Cinderella) among others. (See
discography)
All along I’ve been playing out. I’m more comfortable
on stage. What are the songs I write for myself about? I guess
I’m not angry enough to be rock, and too serious to be
pop. Somewhere between a murderous fiddler and a thoughtful
kid I suppose. But the songs are windows I can look through
and see familiar faces. Some are mine, some are friends, lovers,
family, strangers...but all are faces that are fragile and imperfect
and look more like the truth. |
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