Outlaw Country artist, songwriter, and solo artist Butch Hancock is a founding member of The Flatlanders along with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Joe Ely, and their most recent album was 2021’s Treasure of Love. But as a member of one of the earliest generations of Country-influenced musicians to realize that they could and should write their own songs, Hancock is also an excellent example of the ingenuity from which the burgeoning Americana and singer/songwriter scene might trace their descent.
Growing up in Lubbock, Texas, Hancock’s generation had to find their love of music through radio and through record shops, but they also found that through collaboration and building a community that has, in the case of The Flatlanders, lasted over 50 years. Butch Hancock also has a multi-generational view as his son Rory draws him into musical projects just like he once drew Rory in, passing on the skills and attitudes which help build connections in music. I spoke with Butch Hancock about finding his way in music and how much it means to him to be able to be part of a continuing love of music in his family.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I spoke with Jimmie Dale Gilmore recently, and we were talking about the generational nature of music, and the fact that people need to learn from each other. Do you have anything like that in your background, where people encouraged you as a young person?
Butch Hancock: Well, we grew up in Lubbock, and it was kind of whatever we could find. Jimmie and I met in seventh grade, but we didn’t know for five or six years that we both played guitar. In high school, one of us said, “Hey! You play guitar, too?” [Laughs] It was pretty funny. Besides the ongoing thing of rodeos and a few fiddle contests that I was able to go to as a kid, it was pretty slim pickings, except we had great radio. The radio fascinated us because all this music was coming from somewhere over the horizon. No matter where you looked in Lubbock, you saw the horizon in a big, flat circle around you!
That was the beginnings of it. Jimmie’s dad was already a wonderful picker and played electric guitar, so he had a good basis there. In my family, I had a church organist who made good in New York. He was a choir director and would do concerts. He and I finally got to jam together at a family reunion fifteen or twenty years and it was hysterical. Just getting to jam with somebody, he was in heaven. He liked to improvise. I think my first impression of music was a couple of square dances in Lubbock, with a couple fiddle players. There was also a rodeo up in Colorado Springs when I was five or six years old, where we saw the Harmonicats. It twisted my head around and I haven’t gotten it straight yet! I went down to the front of the auditorium to hear more clearly, and as soon as the show was over, one of the guys came over, and we talked a little bit. I said that I sure liked the harmonicas, so he gave me one of those little bitty four-hole harmonicas, the kind that if you’re not careful, you’ll swallow them. [Laughs] He played a little tune on it. That was my first harmonica. You could play a few songs, simply. I played “Taps” or something like that, and went from there. Later on, I got a full-sized harmonica.
About seventh grade, things started to happen. By high school, I’d been playing the guitar a couple of years and had been working on a banjo. The main thing in Lubbock was trying to find people who played musical instruments, then reading a chord book and trying to piece that together. I never had any formal lessons, really. I had a couple of piano lessons, but I backed out of those pretty quick. But to return to the radio, that really extended our scope with what was possible. We had a couple of great Country stations. I think Waylon Jennings was one of the DJs for a while, before he was famous. The other little thing that was happening was that I would always spend as much time as I could around the car radio, which was on a national level. The most fun was all the old Chuck Berry and Little Richard tunes, and Border Radio was a high point in our lives.
HMS: A couple of things I’m hearing from your story is that with that little harmonica, you were starting trying to break songs down, realizing they were made up of parts, and trying to interpret them. Also, along with the radio, that comes with the realization that there’s a bigger world out there, with people in it who like the same music as you do. It sparks curiosity.
BH: Right! With that in mind, in high school, we started figuring out that there was a good record shop in Lubbock that would bring things in from far across the country. I got started early on Folk music, though I had a Country background to begin with, too. We just kind of built it from there. It’s kind of like seeds getting thrown out into a garden, and wondering, “Who am I? What am I doing out here?” It was just a grand adventure. We realized that we were having an ongoing adventure, without really realizing it. We were busy trying to figure out how to play music. As Joe Ely has said, it was probably years before we figured out that it was legal for people to write songs. I tell everybody, “It took us a while to figure that out, because we’re pretty fast thinkers, but we’re—pretty slow—learners!” That’s followed us all these years.
HMS: Were you someone who started turning over the LPs and looking at the small print and realizing who was playing and who was writing the songs on these records? People still do that, by the way, but things are also a little different with digital.
BH: We had heard the word “songwriter”, but it didn’t dawn on us that we could be doing that. All of our information had come from these other sources. Joe had already had a band or two going on by the time we got out of high school. You’re making me think about how my son, Rory, had access to a bigger world of music than I’ve had. Starting out, I have been amazed by the progress he’s made so fast. He’s left me in the dust as far as picking, and with a lot of things.
It has been really amazing to me to watch his influences, and some of that has been myself and The Flatlanders’ music, but also lots of kinds of music. It’s a lot of the new music, like Conor Oberst, and those guys. It’s the same process that we were doing, except we had to pick up the arm on the record player, and move it back if there was something that we wanted to learn. But the digital world has made things a little easier and more accessible in some ways. The live music has been the heartbeat of all of it through the years. When you can go and see someone playing music, you can absorb a lot, just listening, and trying to figure out how they are doing what they are doing. Rory has been really good at that.
HMS: Have you been involved in Rory’s musical projects over the years? I think he toured with you guys early on.
BH: He’s been living in Terlingua, California, the past four or five years after spending some time up in Olympia, Washington. I think he got tired, finally, of not having enough sunshine, so he moved back down. He got back about the time that we moved from Wimberley, near Austin. I’d spent about 25 years there, and then I moved out to Terlingua. Now everyone’s coming out here! But one day Rory came to me and said, “Hey Dad! I just want to play music all the time.” He was already playing great guitar. Right after he graduated, we did an East Coast tour which he joined us on, and we came to Oklahoma to the Woodie Guthrie festival, and everyone really supported him.
Suddenly, he had a huge family of people who loved him. Later, when we all got together in Terlingua, he put together several bands, and he was also booking them. In one of them, he was fronting the band, and I’d play with some of the bands, and that’s when I get to play harmonica with both hands, without a neck rack! We’ve been really busy with those bands for about a year and a half, doing eight or ten gigs a month or more.
Everybody in Terlingua wants to pick with him. It’s been a beautiful thing to watch. Terlingua is a little ghost town with tourism and Rory has really led the charge in ramping up the music scene. It’s the same process that we went through in Lubbock, though that was on a larger scale, of trying to find people who loved music, who fit their sensibilities. Once that songwriting gate got opened for us in Lubbock, that opened up a world for us.
Actually, I didn’t start recording until three or four years after writing songs. It was kind of like, “How do you do that?” I woke up one morning down in Austin, and said, “Wait a minute! This is America! I can be my own publisher. I can be my own record company.” So we put the songs together, and I was one of the first people in Austin to do that.
HMS: That’s outstanding. That’s a great example to set, too.
BH: Well, Rory has seen all that happening in different forms and at different times, and he has absorbed so much of it. He got to be a rodey with The Flatlander for several tours, and would jump up at the end and play a couple of songs. For me, it’s been incredible to watch him go. One time when he was a kid, he had snuck in and gotten my ukelele when I was gone for a bit, and by the time I got back, he had picked out several Beatles songs. It’s been a joy. When I was coming up, I had a lot of great friends who helped me, and that’s something that’s happened for Rory, too, with so many great friends in music.
HMS: So much of longevity in music, and being able to keep doing the things that you love, is about connecting with other people. They encourage each other and reciprocate that energy. You can do it alone, and some people do, but it’s harder that way.
BH: I realized a while back that when you ask, “Who is a person?”, the answer is, “A person is every person that they have met.” You know? We are everybody we have met. Parts of everybody stick with us. That’s how we make sense out of our own consciousness, almost. Our consciousness is this huge, ridiculous history of our highs and lows. You’re in the milieu of life. You don’t have to like some of it, but you gotta love it!
HMS: If you think about life that way, it certainly takes away some of the ego from it. You learn from others, good and bad. You learn from the bad examples as well as the good ones.
BH: That’s the thing! That’s the trick. You learn who you do and don’t want to be around. You’re learning what your preferences are. But sometimes you may think that you don’t really want to be around someone, and then you find that you want to learn from them, because they sound so good. Maybe you can put positive connection on things where it had been negative. We think of that as a disconnection, but it’s really a connection. If that person loves what they are doing, there’s openness, too. Don’t forget about that openness. That’s what enables people to get together.
But like you said, leave the ego at the door. That’s the great joy that Jimmie, Joe, and I have had playing together, and especially writing songs together. We were doing that 50 years after we started The Flatlanders. You can take on the whole world with that attitude: leave your ego at the door, and don’t take that door anymore. Just go for it. Once an open heart and mind start happening, then you have love, and compassion, and forgiveness, and trying to help folks where you can.
Maybe sometimes you realize where you can’t, but maybe you know somebody else who can. Life is mysterious. Jimmie told me once that he saw a t-shirt that said, “All that is not mystery is guess-work.” [Laughs] Isn’t that wonderful?
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