Available on black wax

A few weeks after Guy Charles Clark left this world, his many compadres and acolytes gathered in Jim McGuire’s photography studio in Nashville to cry a little, laugh a lot, and swap stories and songs.

Our host was one of Guy’s closest friends and his photographer of choice whenever he was forced to endure a photo shoot. Before the rest of us arrived, Senor McGuire had pulled some prints and laid them out on his pool table. Arranged out at odd angles, artfully overlapping, the images formed a photo collage chronicling the life and career of a master storyteller. My eyes naturally gravitated towards the older photos that captured moments I was, literally, marginally a part of, In fact, I could almost see my 20 yr old self slouching just out of the frame.

Then it struck me, like a bolt of Texas hill country lightning, how young he was; his face unlined except at the corners of his eyes, hair dark brown, dangerously near to black, his features as finely chiseled as the guitars he fashioned on his work bench or the songs that he etched onto lined yellow paper and deep into the heart of Texas with a no 2 pencil and by his own admission, a big eraser..

Guy was only 33 when we met but he had always seemed to me, from that day until the last time I saw him alive, above and beyond any such worldly contrivance as time. I could go a year without seeing him and find him utterly un-changed. I fantasized once that, maybe, Guy was like Merlin in the Arthurian legends; born backwards in time, ancient and venerable and growing younger and younger at such a glacial pace that he would one day become the 8 year boy learning how to drive old Jack Prigg’s car down a dusty West Texas road but by that time, all of us would be long ago dead and gone.

But I was wrong. And now he’s gone and when I follow him (because I always have) I’ll leave this world with only one regret and that is that I never wrote a song with Guy Clark.