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 His
native Kentucky and his family’s fundamentalism behind
him, Hayseed finds his niche with songs that are the envy
of his idols—and an honest, deeply emotional voice that
could shake the church rafters
Hayseed
never bothered to learn an instrument, and seeing how he’s
released two albums already, why would he? “It’s both my blessing
and my curse,” he says. A curse because he has to depend on
others to help flesh out the compositions he has rattling
around in his head; a blessing because it’s part and parcel
of what makes his muse unique, just as his upbringing, in
a strict Pentecostal sect in Western Kentucky—without the
pop-culture comforts of TV, movies and mainstream music—sets
him apart. But whether dwelling in his old home of Nashville
or his new digs in the Capital Region, he has never had a
shortage of willing collaborators. Life is like that when
you boast references from Grammy-winners Lucinda Williams
and Emmylou Harris. Life is like that when you’re Hayseed.
A couple of years back, Williams uttered the quote that tends
to precede him these days, telling No Depression magazine:
“Hayseed is, in my mind, on the same level as Bob Dylan and
Neil Young and Van Morrison, [and] I don’t say that about
everybody who comes down the pike. . . . Music has to grab
me in a certain way, and the stuff that does that, it’s a
time-transcendent thing. I put Hayseed right in there with
that batch of stuff.”
Confronted with the praise, Hayseed is almost embarrassed.
“I don’t want people to think that I think so highly of myself,”
he points out in his polite Kentucky manner. “I definitely
know my limitations.” Williams’ main reason for evoking those
legends, though, was to highlight a uniquely timeless quality
in Hayseed’s music, which has one foot in the concerns of
contemporary life and one foot entwined by the deep roots
of country and gospel.
It’s not only music that Hayseed has on his mind these days,
though: In October, right around the time he released his
second album, In Other Words, he made the big move
from his native South to be with his girlfriend Nadine, a
Capital Region native. The two had conducted a long-distance
relationship for some time before he made the choice to relocate
to Clifton Park. “Where I am right now in my life, music is
something I love, and I will always find a way to do it,”
he states emphatically. “But Nadine was where I had to be.”
Hayseed, aka Christopher Wyant, is a big boy with a big singing
voice, a Mennonitelike chin-beard and a honeyed Kentucky drawl,
not exactly the kind of character you’d expect to find living
in Clifton Park—where just down the road from the diner where
he sits amiably munching a cheeseburger, developments of cloned
houses sit clustered on cul-de-sacs. Without his trademark
preacher’s hat, one can see his thick brown hair, shaved down
to a crew cut (“The haircut of an honest, two-pair-of-jeans
working man,” as David Mamet once put it).
Some music fans first got a glimpse of Hayseed staring out
from the cover of his 1998 debut, Melic, an album that
quickly became an alt-country collector’s item after a corporate
fish-swallowing exercise rendered Watermelon Records extinct.
The sepia-toned photo featured a hefty man seated in farmer
overalls, clutching a large, knotted walking stick and staring
placidly out at the world through round wire spectacles like
some kind of Kentucky-hills Buddha. His fustian garb suggested
some kind of mythic religious figure, and the songs on Melic
were steeped as much in the computer age as they were
in old-timey sensibilities and highbrow literature (evoking
T.S. Eliot and Kahlil Gibran).
Central to understanding the music is understanding where
Hayseed came from. “Our little sect was very conservative,
very way-to-the-right, even within the organization that they
belonged to,” he says. The pressure on young Christopher was
magnified by his father’s status as reverend. “As a kid, anywhere
I went at anytime of day or night, I wasn’t just free to be
a kid. I had to represent a bunch of things: I was representing
God. I was representing my religion. I was representing my
church and my dad.” Nevertheless, a natural, bookish curiosity
led him to question his family’s faith as he got older. “I
can remember staying up until 6 in the morning talking to
my dad or my uncle, trying to get to the basis of a lot of
questions I had. A lot of times the answer was, well, ‘I said
so.’ ”
That unquestioning, granite mentality was stifling, not to
mention the devastating proportions of the guilt it instilled
in him. “I read about generations growing up in fear of the
bomb and all that kind of stuff—that was never a big part
of my consciousness. What was a big part of my consciousness
was whether or not I would go to hell. As a kid, if I was
to come home and couldn’t find my parents in the house, I’d
think they went to heaven, that the rapture had happened and
that I was left behind because I was a bad kid. Tremendous
guilt. Tremendous fear.”
One thing he was allowed to indulge in while growing up was
singing. In church, he was encouraged to belt the music of
the gospel as loudly as he wanted. It was great training,
and the result was a thunderously resonant instrument. Eric
Babcock, founder of seminal alt-country label Bloodshot Records
(later the head of Checkered Past and, currently, Catamount)
knows a little something about good country singers. “You
can easily hear the way that voice would bounce around in
the rafters of a church,” he says. “And what he learned was
not about technique, as much as about honest expression of
deep feeling. I doubt that he’s ever sung a note he didn’t
mean, and I know he wouldn’t want to. Here in the era of shiny
mannequins warbling pretty vacancies, it’s gratifying to hear
such clear conviction—and doubly gratifying that it’s coming
from the mouth of someone built like a defensive tackle.”
Many Albany residents first heard Hayseed’s pipes during the
Brand New Opry show at Valentine’s in February. Hayseed introduced
himself a cappella (a move akin to walking the high-wire netless)
with “Father’s Lament,” a number that is essentially a rustic
field holler wrapped around contemporary anguish: In this
case, a father’s acceptance after losing a hard-fought custody
battle. The father just wants his child to know how hard he
fought and to feel his love from afar, and that urgency was
palpable in Hayseed’s reading. The murmuring barroom snapped
to rapt attention and then broke into appreciative whoops
as Hayseed’s voice rippled out over the crowd. Even at the
back of the bar, people were turning to each other and commenting
at the unique figure belting his heart out on stage in a preacher’s
hat. Albany, it seems, hadn’t seen too many like Hayseed before.
“Not
many are like Hayseed, in part because not many have lived
as he did . . . and does,” No Depression editor Grant
Alden (whom you might have seen weighing in on the Steve Earle
controversy on CNN last summer) told me recently, pointing
out the underlying tension in Hayseed’s music between his
fire-and-brimstone upbringing and the secular world he has
chosen to inhabit instead. “Christopher has been powerfully
shaped by the deeply rooted sounds of Southern [that is, white]
gospel music and black gospel. Add on to that . . . dozens
of other songwriters whose language is informed by poetry,
and you get somewhere near to understanding where his music
comes from. Mostly, though, he’s just a good and complicated
man.”
His “spiritual withdrawal and rebirth,” as Hayseed refers
it, came in Nashville, where he went for a summer in 1986,
at age 20, and ended up staying 16 years. The “Hayseed” persona
came about from a stage riff he would do during impromptu
a cappella gigs, which essentially became mini-performance
pieces.
“I
had some buddies who were playing, so I said, ‘Just give me
20 minutes while you’re setting up. So I’d walk up there in
my overalls and I had my big stick and I made up this character.
I’d say, ‘Hi y’all, my name’s Clifford Eugene Mason from Caldwell
County, Kentucky, but most people just call me Hayseed,’ ”
he drawls, exaggerating his accent. “And then I’d just start
bullshittin’. ”
The moniker stuck, and the newly christened Hayseed used the
image to upend a mode of cultural elitism. “I hate the idea
in popular culture that if anybody wants to dumb down a character
in their story or their TV show, give them a Southern accent
and they’ll immediately look dumb. So I thought, well, what
if I just adopted ‘Hayseed,’ took away the negative impact
of it and presented music that made it impossible to say that
I was ignorant.” Ironically, Hayseed ended up donning the
hat and overalls for the same reason that bluegrass pioneer
Bill Monroe and his players donned their Sunday best for performances.
In Nashville, he fell in with quite a crowd of artists. He
remembers one New Year’s Eve at Emmylou Harris’ house. “She
fixed a big pot of beef stew, and I’m sitting at a table with
Emmylou, Buddy Miller, Emmylou’s mom, Lucinda, Emmylou’s daughter,
and Hombre [Hayseed collaborator Richard Price]. I’m thinking,
‘How did I get in this picture?’ ”
Hayseed also remembers a surreal Saturday night in the late
’90s when Lucinda Williams called him at home. “She said,
‘Can you come over here?’ I said, ‘Where’s here?’ She said,
‘John Prine’s house.’ ” Needless to say, Hayseed was off like
a prom dress. “I find myself, a little while later, sitting
at table, and there’s John Prine, Lucinda and me, and they’re
talking about songwriting. They’re asking my opinion and how
I do it, and I’m thinking, ‘What do I know?’ ” As for his
songwriting influences, Hayseed cites everyone from Townes
Van Zandt to post-punkers The The, whose apocalyptic Mind
Bomb album made a distinct impression.
As for his family back home, they didn’t always approve of
his musical aspirations. “Early on they didn’t like it at
all that I was not doing gospel music [and] that I was singing
in bars.” They did, however, begin to open their minds after
Hayseed introduced them to Lucinda Williams at a street concert
in Nashville. “They started seeing her name in the newspapers,
and they had met her, [so] getting commendations from her,
that gave me some validation.” His family also had doubts
that he would ever settle down. “To the extent that my parents
actually bought me a grave plot with them,” he laughs.
All of that is looking different after his move northward
to be with Nadine, a music fan who first contacted Hayseed
after hearing Melic, striking up a correspondence.
“My only regret is that she’ll never get to meet my dad,”
Hayseed says. His father, the Rev. Dwight Wyant, passed away
in 2001 at age 57. In Other Words is dedicated to him,
and the album’s “Old Time Preacher Man” is a gospel number
that his dad loved to sing in church. Hayseed, the prodigal
son, had planned on dedicating the album to his father long
before he knew his passing was imminent. But rather than wait
to surprise him, he took his dad for a drive in the country
to hear a rough recording of “Old Time Preacher Man.” “For
some reason, I just had this gut feeling I had to play this
for him . . . and he loved it. A couple months later, Dad
died.”
Hayseed’s spirituality isn’t strictly Christian these days;
rather, he draws a life philosophy from multiple sources (many
gained through voracious reading) that can be felt in his
music, a new-millennium brand of country-gospel. He cites
Kahlil Gibran’s poem “Anthem of Humanity” as a big influence.
“It draws a little bit from all these different religions
and philosophies and says: This makes me who I am. And that’s
where I see myself,” he claims. “If you look to [the community]
I came from, they would pretty much consider me a heretic.
But if you look at other things that people are doing and
believing, I’m way over here on the right. I can live with
that.”
As for his musical future, one of the “few modern singer-songwriters
who doesn’t appear beholden to Bob Dylan” (as the Austin
Chronicle described him) has done several guest spots
with Albany roots-rockers the Coal Palace Kings, something
he hopes to do more of in the future. He also hopes to do
some performances with Kevin Maul, the area resident known
nationally for his dobro and multi-instrumentalist work with
Robin & Linda Williams, Garrison Keillor and Fugs alum
Pete Stampfel. “We hooked up the other night and did a rehearsal.
We’re probably going to do some stuff as Hayseed, but we’ve
actually talked about doing a band together. I would love
to do something like that.”
Whatever Hayseed’s musical path, one gets the sense he’ll
accomplish what he desires—for at the foundation of his personality
is an unforced, polite, yet razor-clear directness. This must
have been the directness with which he questioned his father
over the family religion. This is also the forthright nature
to which Sire Records head Seymour Stein must have conceded
after Hayseed called every day for several weeks to retrieve
ownership of Melic. It’s also the manner with which
he convinced Emmylou Harris to duet with him on his most recent
album. (“I just asked her,” Hayseed says simply.)
“The
only thing I ask,” Hayseed says, in this direct fashion before
parting, “is that you mention my dad and Nadine’s daughter,
[9-year-old] Emily.” Done.
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