Comment on this story What: Jay Clark and the CCstringband CD Release Show When: Sunday, June 27, 9 p.m. Where: Barley’s Cost: Free

Jay Clark returns to Knoxville after an academic sabbatical

by Clint Casey

Jay Clark’s been a long time gone. A founding member of the Stringbeans with Robin and Cruz Contreras, Clark left in 1999 to pursue a Ph.D. at Oklahoma State University before returning to Knoxville in 2003 to participate in a post-doctorate program at UT working with black bears in the Smoky Mountains.

In 1995, Clark met Robin at UT, and the two began singing together for their own enjoyment and at local churches. Clark says, “Later, there were a couple of guys on the Ag campus in the same department that I was in that played banjo and bass. Then Robin and Cruz met and started dating, and all five of us started playing together and formed the Stringbeans.” The group disbanded in 1999 with Clark’s departure, and eventually evolved into Robinella and the CCstringband.

When Clark returned in June of 2003, he eased back into performing on occasion with his college bandmates, cultivating material written during his academic quarantine in the Midwest for the recently released Pen to Paper. “There’s a couple of songs on the album that I wrote as early as 1996, and then there’s a handful I wrote last year.” Clark says. Pen to Paper is a representative sampling of his ability to write for diverse genres. “The album has a classic country sound, definitely a bluegrass influence on a few of songs, and a little bit of the Americana sound with a rock twist. We were trying to get diversity in the arrangement of things.”

As the son of a Cumberland Presbyterian preacher from Winchester, Tenn., Clark’s devout religious upbringing is apparent in his songwriting. However, he manages to balance faith with a soft spot for drinking. “It is an unusual combination, given my upbringing. It’s a pretty laid-back denomination, but drinking is not something that was popular in my household,” Clark says. “I like to go out and have a beer or two or more as much as anybody, but, at the same time, you’ll usually find me at church on Sunday morning.”

Despite years of experience performing in front of crowds, Clark is still unnerved when performing his own material. “I was very comfortable with the Stringbeans, ’cause we’d played together so many years. When you get 50 songs that you can nail just about every time, you don’t have to worry about how it’s going to end or if you mess up here and there. In terms of the stuff we’ve been doing now, it usually takes one song to get in the zone, because the musicians I’m playing with, Cruz and Billy [Contreras], are amazing. They can hear one line of something and jump right in it,” Clark says. “That helps in terms of being relaxed and getting into your element.

“Admittedly, when I’m doing my original material, I really enjoy looking out and seeing who’s listening. If it’s not just background noise, and they’re really listening to what you’ve created. That gives me a lot of satisfaction, and when you see that, it’s easy to relax. Even if it’s only 10 people out of 150, there’s a certain satisfaction that helps you lay back and go with the flow.”

Clark credits John Prine, Kris Kristofferson and James Taylor as songwriting influences, but he writes in his own style, typically composing a few lines or pieces of songs that may remain undeveloped for years. “I have a microphone on my computer at home; it’s nothing fancy, but when I’m sitting around the house I make sure that the computer is on. I’ll get a tune in my head from playing around on the guitar and immediately hit record and just start singing,” Clark says. “It’s not really just writing the words down first and singing it, it’s mostly just ad libbing. If there’s something I like, I’ll go back and write it down. It may happen that day, or it may be a few months before a song is finished.

“The song ‘Coal Mining Man’ on Pen to Paper is about my papaw. I wrote one of the choruses to that song in his hospital room the day he died—looking out the window at the Ohio River. That chorus stayed in my head since the winter of 2000, and I didn’t finish that song until last May,” Clark says. “It’s just of matter of when something comes to me, I write it down before I forget it.”

Between his post-doctorate work at UT with the Department of Forestry, Wildlife, and Fisheries, and developing a musical career of his own, Clark found time to work with Robinella and the CCstringband on their sophomore major label release scheduled for January. The album will feature “Sunday Afternoon,” one of his songs, and Clark added harmony vocals to “Teardrops,” a song penned by Robin.

However, despite his musical and academic successes, Clark has an aw-shucks air of sincerity about him: down-to-earth and heavily grounded with the idea that the respect of an audience is earned. Clark, however, is poised to ease into a region heavily inundated with singer-songwriters and command respect.

June 24, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 26 © 2004 Metro Pulse