Hog Mountain’s ‘poet laureate’ sings his stories
By Kristin Yarbrough. Published in the Blount Countian on February 22, 2023.
As Cliff Abbott debuted songs from his fifth solo album at Sugar Creek Music Club in Hayden, the audience of fans, friends, and fellow musicians hung on every word. "Each song is a story," said Karen McKibbon, a Hayden resident who attended the show. "A story set to music."
"I'm a lyrics guy," explained the Hog Mountain-based musician. "I want to hear the story and to know how it ends. I want the 'why' behind the 'what' in the lyrics."
A recurring theme of Cliff's stories is the differences between then and now. In "You Can Go Home But You Can't Go Back" the tiny Gulf Coast hometown of Cliff’s wife sits in for your town and mine, where a little country highway is now six lanes wide and a supermarket replaced the old general store that weighed babies on the butcher scale. Each verse is like a page from a photo album, inviting the listener to reminisce and reflect on the inevitability of change.
"I dubbed Cliff the poet laureate of Hog Mountain," said Mac McAllister, who co-founded Sugar Creek Music Club with his wife Pat. “Cliff is beloved by most everyone in our musical community along with many in the Bluegrass community all over the United States."
Roger Miller, Bobby Bare, Loretta Lynn, Pete Goble, and rocker John Fogerty are among Cliff's favorite musicians. "I've always been amazed at the songwriters," he explained, noting Tom T. Hall as a standout: "Most of his songs are simply life stories that you could imagine old men telling each other on a bench in front of the hardware store."
For Cliff, inspiration for a song can come from anywhere. A retired truck driver, he often draws on his years on the road. "Flying in My Truck" comically compares the airplanes of yore that left him "thunderstruck" with the frustrations of traveling today, leading him to prefer the road: "If in a tiny window seat you're stuck," Cliff sings, " Look down to see me flying in my truck."
To introduce "Mary's Rocking Chair," his new album's title track, Cliff shared that the idea "came from way back in my childhood when my parents forced me to listen to these twangy old tear-jerkin' country songs." But the ending of his version "was just too sad," he told the Sugar Creek audience. "So I wrote a sappy old twangy song with a happy ending."
Still, Cliff doesn't shy away from serious, sometimes heartbreaking songs. A sense of urgency accompanies the verses of the 1921 Tulsa massacre in "The Mourning Dove Still Grieves," while the chorus somberly references the racially-fueled violence that is prevalent still today.
"The best songs awaken emotions," Cliff explained. "It might bring back a memory, a feeling, a laugh or a tear, or maybe just the urge to tap a foot or get up and dance."
A compassionate observer of the human condition, Cliff is adept at surprising the listener and challenging prejudices. In a "stealth gospel song" called "Another Man," he sings, "I know you're leaving me for a man who loves you more than I do"; any judgement of narrator’s love is transformed to sympathy as Cliff's story reveals that the "spacious mansion waiting for you" is a heavenly one.
"Crazy Woman" introduces a homeless, alcoholic woman who, we learn as the song progresses, had been a hero medic on the battlefield. "I was thinking about how we tend to use the word homeless as a definer rather than as a condition," Cliff said. "What I was struck by is that often the difference between then and now is just a few details." The song’s structure mirrors this resemblance: “The first half and second half are exactly the same except for a few details."
Cliff also offers his gift for storytelling as a Sunday School teacher at Crossroads Baptist Church in Warrior. It was at Crossroads that Cliff met Lynn Wigington, a Mount High resident who attended Cliff's Sugar Creek show. Lynn arrives at Crossroads early each Sunday to prepare some 20 pots of coffee for the congregation. "I see the top of the iceberg," Lynn said about his grasp of the Bible. "Cliff helps me understand it. He has a super talent for that."
In 2006, after years in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Georgia, Cliff was offered a management opportunity at a trucking company. "It was a chance to move back to the South and we jumped on it!" He and his wife Thresa chose the Hog Mountain area of Nectar.
Since then, Cliff's road trips have been of the local sort, including those with his former bandmates. "Cliff and I have been through some hills and hollers playing Bluegrass together when he was playing bass in the band," said Cottonmouth Creek bandleader Kevin Atkins, who contributed lead guitar and harmonizing vocals on Cliff's latest album and at the Sugar Creek show. "It was nice to have a guy who was a truck driver in the band. You could kinda kick back and relax and know he's gonna get you there — and he always did," Kevin shared.
On the second Thursday of each month, Cliff drives the Highway 45 horseshoe to Sugar Creek SongCrafters. The free monthly gathering, a brainchild of Mac and Cliff along with Skip Cochran, launched in March 2022 as "a place where aspiring songwriters could perform in an atmosphere of encouragement," Cliff said.
Interspersed with Cliff’s set, Kevin and two other musicians covered songs from Cliff’s extensive catalog and spoke of Cliff’s impact on their lives. “Cliff Abbott was the very first songwriter who walked into my life and inspired me,” Hunter Blake McClendon shared before performing Cliff’s “My Alabama Home.” A University of North Alabama student who released his second album last month, Hunter said that before meeting Cliff at SongCrafters, “I had maybe two or three songs. He’s mentored me and been a friend to me.”
Cliff urges each of us to tell our tales, sing our songs. "You were blessed with creativity for a reason — use it!" he encouraged. "Don't do it for fame or fortune; do it for you. Don't wait til you feel you're 'good enough'; do it now."
Cliff Abbott’s music can be streamed or purchased from cliffabbott.com.