Steven Womack: Way Past Dead

Slim put his head down on his guitar and rolled it from side to side, like he’d been through this routine before. Two women sitting next to me put their heads together, and I heard one of them whisper: “Oh, she always does this. She’s always late. I think it’s just to get attention.”

And then the other one whispered back: “Yeah, either that or she just likes to piss Slim off.”

“What do you expect from an ex-wife?” The first one giggled.

“Oh, I think it’s just an act.…”

Ex-wife? Slim had never mentioned an ex-wife. Why would Slim be sitting in a crowded club on a Sunday night singing songs with his ex-wife? My ex and I avoided each other unless it was absolutely unavoidable.

Music people are strange.

The woman walked into our view from the right, around the corner, her long thin arms waving at the crowd, hands splayed out chaotically, fingers pointing everywhere at once. A fat guy with a long, scraggly beard and thick glasses sat in front of me. I shifted in my seat to look around him and stared.

She was tall; nearly as tall, I figured, as Marsha’s six-one, six-two. Her hair was straight, the color of dark ash, and hung down her back below her waist Crystal Gayle-style. She wore a pair of jeans that must have been painted on and a crocheted white sweater that was nearly see-through. Her face was thin, her features fine: pointed nose, sculpted cheekbones.

She made me ache.

“Becca,” Slim said into the microphone, his voice scolding her.

“Oh, hush,” she said in a voice loud enough and penetrating enough not to need amplification. “Don’t start on me, Slim.”

The audience howled. The two women next to me shook with laughter, as if they’d seen this before and were expecting it. The fourth singer, the one across from Ray, hit a loud E chord on his guitar.

“I’m Slim Gibson,” Slim announced to the audience, his voice its usual low and slow. “And this ravishing beauty here is the late Rebecca Gibson, my lovely ex-wife and talented ex-songwriting partner.”

The audience laughter swelled. Evidently, I was the only one who hadn’t seen this dog-and-pony show before. I found it hard to laugh; there was a sharper edge to all this than I liked.

Rebecca Gibson slid her long body between the tables, through the crowd, and onto the empty chair across from Slim. She sat down, crossed her legs, and pulled the microphone on its horizontal stand to her lips.

“I may not be on time,” she said brashly, “but there’s no call for you to refer to me as the late Rebecca Gibson.”

The audience roared.

“The romance may be gone, but the royalties remain, right, baby?” she said.

More roaring. She was animated, cheeky, seemingly in constant motion. In a different time, she might have been labeled brazen. She was as extroverted as Slim was introverted. The difference in the two must have made for an interesting marriage, which as far as I’m concerned is only a slight variation on the ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times .

I sort of knew what to expect next. At a songwriters’ roundtable, four singer-songwriters sit in a circle and take turns, each singing one of his or her own songs. The other three could jump in and provide a little background or harmony, but basically each one had the stage to himself. I also knew from the couple of other times I’d been to the Bluebird that Slim was in the starting position. In just a second or two, as Rebecca adjusted her mike and settled in, Slim ran his pick down the six-string one last time to get everybody’s attention.

“This is one that Becca and I wrote a long time ago,” he said. “Hope you like it.”

Then Slim played a three-chord progression that was elegant in its simplicity. Ray and the other songwriter, whose name I never did get, slid into accompaniment, the strings of their guitars filling the spaces in Slim’s lead. Then Slim began singing, his voice plaintive and sweet, right on key, exactly where it needed to be. I recognized the song, “All My Empty Heart Wants Is You,” as one that had been recorded a few years back by some minor up-and-comer who rapidly came and went.

Like most country songs, it hit somewhere real deep, on a fundamental, almost profound human level. Most country’s like that-songs about loneliness and despair and struggling to find love in a cold world. Sometimes it could go over the top; “crying in your beer” jokes about country music had become cliches. I wasn’t much of a country fan, but only because I hadn’t taken the time to learn it, study it. Maybe, I thought, I ought to give it a chance.

When Slim finished the first verse and transitioned into the chorus, Rebecca’s voice melded with his in a harmony that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I realized at that moment why people who love this stuff get so damned crazy about it. When she talked, her voice was almost a yell. But singing there with Slim, their voices filling the room, the audience quiet enough to hear heartbeats … there was something about it that ran deep and strong and powerful.

After a few moments I got lost in it, my conscious mind on hold and something inside me just following their voices, not even aware of the words as words. The words and the music floated and bore me and everyone else in the room along. There was magic there, mystery and focus and intensity. Slim, who rarely said more than ten words to anybody, was liberated by the act of singing and playing. Something inside him soared. And Rebecca, who was loud and irritating and hyperactive outside the song, became calm and pure and sweet when lost inside the music. Each was yin to the other’s yang; their opposites matched perfectly, their sameness blending into one. The marriage of these two gifted people had to be both fiercely passionate and powerfully doomed.

Nobody can sing all the time.

Slim hit the last word in the song and let his own voice fade away as he completed the last run on the chord progression. Ray and the other picker pulled back just at the end, leaving Slim’s final notes echoing in the room to dead silence.

Then I was on my feet, clapping until my hands burned and my arms ached. My voice grew hoarse from cheering along with the rest of the room. They’d made the audience wait and fidget and grow impatient, and then just at the right instant, they’d knocked us flat on our butts.

“Whew,” Rebecca spewed, fanning herself with her right hand, “if we’d been able to do that all the time, we’d still be married. Right, baby?”

Slim stared at her silently, his brown eyes boring a hole through her, almost oblivious to the crowd around them. It seemed as if the temperature in the room had gone up about fifty degrees. My chigger bites from Louisville-and I’ll let you guess where most of them were started itching again like crazy.

Ray hit a chord, then pulled his microphone closer.

“That’s gonna be a tough one to follow. Why don’t we shift gears jest a little?”

Ray exaggerated his Southern drawl to the point of nausea. I wondered how many people in the audience knew he was born just a block from the last stop on the double-L train in Canarsie, and still rode the subway to his job in Brooklyn up until maybe twelve years ago.

“Y’all sing along with me on this one, you’ve got a mind to.…” And then Ray went into this hilarious song about a revival preacher caught with his pants down in the Widow Walker’s living room.

Then it was Rebecca’s turn. She adjusted the microphone and fidgeted in her chair, as if it were physically impossible for her to sit in one position for longer than a moment or two.

“Well, as most of y’all know,” she began, “I’ve just finished recording what I hope is going to be my breakout album.”