Ghosts Everywhere: John Hiatt's 'Crossing Muddy Waters' at 25

Celebrating 25 years of one of John Hiatt's most powerful albums with a previously unpublished portion of an interview with David Immerglück from 'Have a Little Faith: The John Hiatt Story.'

John Hiatt’s Crossing Muddy Waters was released 25 years ago on September 26th, 2000, during an important turning point in the music industry. If the contents of the album sounded as if they came from a century earlier, its presentation looked to the future.

At the time, Hiatt was a free agent, having recently been set free from Capitol after two studio albums and a best-of package. He and his manager noticed that a group called eMusic¹ were leading the race at the time to become the world’s first digital music retailer. Through a deal cut with both eMusic for online sales and the venerable Vanguard label for physical, Hiatt had secured a way to the future through the past to release Crossing Muddy Waters to the world.

The press release read in part:

EMusic.com Inc, the Internet’s leading seller of downloadable music, today announced an exclusive music distribution agreement with contemporary rock icon, John Hiatt. This autumn, EMusic will sell Hiatt’s new album digitally in MP3 -- as well as partner with independent music label Vanguard Records to simultaneously offer the album through traditional retail outlets on compact disc.

Fancy!

From Have a Little Faith: The John Hiatt Story:

Vanguard was the perfect vehicle to distribute John’s first new collection of songs for the new millennium, as Crossing Muddy Waters had a little of that Mississippi John Hurt sound that inspired the burgeoning folkie so many years ago. It is also, at times, a harrowing piece of work.

“That kind of stuff came from sitting and writing songs on the farm,” John explains. “We lived in a hollow, and right up the road, there were people whose families had lived there for two hundred years. So you’re just kind of soaking in that kind of stuff out where we lived. The Indigenous people’s presence in that area and on our farm—there were ghosts everywhere. So it was not hard to get inspired and to get the songs that seemed to come up deep out of the dirt out there.”

Hiatt talked about the inspiration behind “Lift Up Every Stone” after performing it in an online livestream with Lyle Lovett on May 29, 2020. “It was just an observation. The kids were little, and I was going to pick one of ’em up. Here in the South, there are some old walls that were put up initially by slaves. Some people have rebuilt them; some people have torn them down. They’re pretty prevalent still in Tennessee just as decoration. I remember picking up one of my daughters, and the lady was giving me directions up to the house. It was set back about a quarter mile off the road, and she said, ‘Just come up the drive and turn right at our slave wall.’ So I went home that evening, and I just started . . . I just saw . . . ghosts.”

“What Do We Do Now” was inspired by a rocky time in his and Nancy’s relationship about five years in, and by an answer to a label guy from John’s past that made a snide comment about one of his choruses being “too repetitive.” Here, the repetition of the song’s title adds to the uncertainty of the emotion behind it. “Only the Song Survives” was inspired by a vehicle accident Nancy had recently experienced, while “Mr. Stanley” was in remembrance of her father, whom John admired unfailingly, and who had taken him and Nancy out for their first dinner as husband and wife years before.

“My father-in-law, Gene, took us out to a hamburger restaurant for the celebration,” John recalls. “He took us to Dalts Grill,” Nancy elaborates. John beams, “It was great. It was classic. It was perfect.”

Musically, “Mr. Stanley” brought to the surface John’s love of the haunting folk blues of Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt that had influenced him when he was just starting out on his own in semi-crowded coffeehouses.

For help on Crossing Muddy Waters, Hiatt once again called on multi-instrumentalist David Immerglück and bassist/percussionist Davey Faragher. “Justin Niebank had a little recording studio two farms over from us,” John explains. “Justin, of course, did all the great records for Alligator and Arhoolie and had since come to Nashville and had become a hugely successful producer/engineer in country music. He had a little home studio in those days, and that’s how we started. David and Davey and I had been playing shows as a trio and just loved the sound. So we thought, Well, let’s go in and make this record just as a trio. We did it in four days, very much like Bring the Family.”

They recorded what became Crossing Muddy Waters on April 23rd through 26th of 2000, but a year or so before, Hiatt and Immerglück scouted out the studio to record a demo. Here’s a part of the interview with Immerglück that didn’t make it in the book about that moment, presented here for the first time:

There’s a demo session that John and I did at Dark Horse Studios. That demo session was really funny. It was out in the country on this ranch, on a horse farm. All state-of-the-art stuff in the control room and the tracking room—they might have had several tracking rooms.

They wanted John to record there. Everyone in Nashville always revered John, and John seemed to view the Nashville cognoscenti with a slanted eye. He didn’t want to be part of any club that would have him as a member. And it was always that way there. Everyone wanted to say that John had recorded at their studio, John played at their club, John ate at their restaurant…It was like this badge of cool or something in Nashville, because at the time, he was a bit of a renegade there.

So, our friend, this engineer whom we met at the Best of John Hiatt sessions from Philly, Michael Musmanno, he and I stayed in a hotel in downtown Nashville the night before and we go out to the studio the first day. We walk into the control room and there’s someone there receiving us and showing us all the whistles and bells, and John says, ‘I don’t like this. It’s too fancy.’ And he just sits down in the coffee lounge and starts playing guitar and says, ‘Let’s record in here.’ I’m like, ‘Sure! Let’s just record here in the reception.’

And they [the studio folks] were uptight about this. They wanted the photo op of John recording in their studio for their website, their pamphlet, or whatever. They wanted photos of John recording with the ‘thumbs up’ in the recording studio. John was having none of it. I would imagine that he started sensing that that’s what they wanted, and he was definitely not going to give that to them. We just recorded in the coffee lounge, set up on two couches facing each other, and did the demo in there. We worked that way for about three days.

I want to say every now and again, someone from the studio would come in and ask, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come in? It’s a great recording room in the other room.’ ‘No, we’re fine here, thanks.’ It was a hilarious scenario. One of the tracks from that session ended up on Crossing Muddy Waters as “Mr. Stanley.”

As with “Life Up Every Stone,” ghosts haunt and circle the edges of “Take It Down,” a rare political moment in Hiatt’s catalog. In the final verse, he calls out South Carolina for still waving the Confederate flag at the State Capitol.

South Carolina, where are you
We were once lost and now we’re found
The war is over, the battle’s through; so take it down

A compromise was reached that same year between the state and the NAACP when the flag was moved from the Capitol Dome to next to a Confederate monument, though still on State House grounds.

Fifteen years later, on July 10, 2015, it was finally, permanently, and officially taken down.² It apparently took the massacre of nine Black church members at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston just a month before—and protests resulting from it, including a heroic act of civil disobedience by activist and filmmaker Bree Newsome who, on June 27th, scurried thirty feet up the flag pole, removed the stars and bars, and was promptly arrested when she touched back down—before action would be taken.³

Many fans have pointed to Crossing Muddy Waters’ title track as directly inspired by the suicide of Hiatt’s second wife, Isabella. The truth, as often happens, is a tad, well, muddier. “I don’t write specifically about events in my life,” John says. “I get a little from here and a little from there. I created a character in that song. That wasn’t necessarily me, but it’s certainly informed by my experiences. So . . . yeah.”

25 years on, the ghosts that haunt Crossing Muddy Waters still surround us. Sometimes they comfort, sometimes they warn, but they remain.

Join The Mixtape in celebrating one of John Hiatt’s masterpieces on its 25th birthday, however you get your music, by clicking the album cover below…

1. Apparently, eMusic is still a thing, but an initial search for John Hiatt in general, much less ‘Crossing Muddy Waters,’ ironically yielded no results.

2. Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/confederate-flag-south-carolina-statehouse-grounds-comes-down/

3. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/us/politics/bree-newsome-bass-confederate-flag.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ok8.PSRF.xcsXkop1qaae&smid=url-share