Story told by Lovett reveals Hyatt the man

The Showroom to host tribute to late Walter Hyatt

Celebrating the songs and legacy of one of Spartanburg's most notable creative musical artists, musicians from across the region will join local acts for a concert Saturday night at The Showroom. They will pay tribute to the late Walter Hyatt and showcase the release of his new CD, "Some Unfinished Business: Volume One."

Showtime is 8 p.m. and tickets are $10.

Saturday's lineup features a local and regional cross-section of Hyatt's family, friends, colleagues and admirers, who will perform material dating back to his revered Uncle Walt's Band era, as well as selections from his critically acclaimed solo career.

The Showroom Director Stephen Long said he was excited about the local music legacy the concert would highlight.

"This is an important thing for us to be involved in," he said. "Hopefully a whole new generation of people (is) going to know a little bit more about his music and who he was."

The concert comes on the heels of the new CD's debut in Nashville, Tenn., in late January, and is the second of four events illuminating Hyatt, with programs and concerts in Austin, Texas, and Charleston planned for the coming months.

Hyatt's widow, Heidi Hyatt, the CD's executive producer, said in a phone conversation from her Nashville home that she had received much encouragement as she developed the project from those who knew her late husband.

"So many people are just happy it's being done," she said. "The support I have of people that want Walter's music to live on is phenomenal."

Walter was working on a new album in May 1996 when he was killed at age 47 along with 109 others in the ValuJet 592 plane crash in the Florida Everglades.

Heidi Hyatt said she met with many of Walter's musical companions to compile material for the record, and said the search for and discovery of new songs was a compelling part of the process.

"You know, you're looking for that one roll of film that wasn't developed, or that note, that piece of paper, that something written down that you hadn't seen before," she said. "These recordings were really like that - they were songs I had never heard before."

The new CD embellishes raw versions of Walter Hyatt's unfinished recordings Heidi discovered with new performances from several of his contemporaries.

Dobro virtuoso Jerry Douglas adds slide textures to the recording; Warren Hood, son of late Uncle Walt's Band member Champ Hood, adds fiddle inflections; and sole surviving Uncle Walt's Band member David Ball, also a Spartanburg native, lends his vocals to the album. Ball is among the artists performing at Saturday night's concert.

Walter Hyatt's older brother George is coming into town to play the show, as is Tommy Goldsmith, Walter Hyatt and Champ Hood's bandmate in late-1970s Nashville outfit The Contenders.

Upstate native and Nashville transplant Brian Ashley Jones returns home for the show, and Atlanta singer, songwriter and guitarist Caroline Aiken, one of Hyatt's more recent colleagues, rounds out the roster of out-of-town talent coming in for the show.

As for local talent, the lineup spans from Hyatt's early contemporaries from the Spartanburg scene such as David Ezell to Fayssoux McLean.

Marshall Hood (Champ Hood's nephew), Jeff Brown, Rob Teter and Matthew Parks, formerly of The DesChamps Band (which was a tribute to Uncle Walt's Band), will be on hand to offer their well-honed versions of Hyatt's songs.

Marshall Hood said, via telephone from his Austin home, he would strive to keep even the most knowledgeable of Walter Hyatt's fans on their toes.

"I'm looking forward to hopefully playing some of Walter's stuff that's not the norm of what most people know of (his) repertoire," he said, adding he would like to demonstrate "how many songs he wrote and how good all of them are."

Concert promoter Chip Smith, a longtime acquaintance of members of Uncle Walt's Band and a fervent devotee of their music, booked the majority of the artists for Saturday's show and is coordinating the evening's program.

He said that while the evening's entertainers are billed independently, he said the audience should not be surprised if some impromptu collaboration develops during the show.

Smith attributed Hyatt's creative strength to his open-mindedness and an insatiable appetite for music almost any way he could get his hands on it.

"He was just a melting pot, and he was a sponge. He drew from so many different genres of music," he said.

"(Walter and bandmate Ball) were going to junk stores and buying 78s (old vinyl record albums) of The Delta Rhythm Boys and Django Reinhardt," he said.

Smith said their widely varied influences gave Uncle Walt's Band a style and philosophy all its own.

"Uncle Walt's (Band) was a movement," he said. "It wasn't just three guys getting together playing music. Years after they broke up, people are still listening to their music.

"The interesting thing about Uncle Walt's Band's music," he added, "is by today's standards we call it Americana, but in the '70s we called it esoteric. It was multicultural, esoteric, drawing from different (sources) to become this acoustic power trio with interesting lyrics to it. Lyrically and musically, his music is really timeless."

www.goupstate.com/article/20080207/NEWS/802070315

Walter Hyatt Tribute

CD Release Show

Walter Hyatt's heavenly music

Musicians honor Hyatt's spirit with his music

Artists, friends of late singer-songwriter step in to finish 'Some Unfinished Business'

By PETER COOPER • Staff Writer • January 22, 2008

DOBRO master Jerry Douglas is among the most revered and consequential musicians alive, and he's very familiar with the studio drill. For decades, he's been pleasing producers with his instrumental flights. Recording the new Walter Hyatt album, though, felt like something entirely different.
"You're sitting there, with the headphones on, and you're hearing Walter's voice like he's right beside you," Douglas said. "But he's as far away as he could get."

Hyatt, Nashville music's gentleman-poet and a formative inspiration to Lyle Lovett, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and others, died in 1996 at age 46. He was flying on a commercial aircraft, heading from a gig in Florida to his daughter's college graduation, when his plane crashed in the Florida Everglades. He left behind three children, a wife, a mournful music community and shards of recordings that he was expecting to craft into a finished album.

Years later, Douglas and other ace musicians were layering new parts on Hyatt's final batch of recordings, taking care to adhere to a musical vision that was expansive in reach and subtly emotional.

"All the rules of normal sessions . . . those didn't apply," Douglas said. "It wasn't trying to please the producer so much as it was trying to please this spirit. You didn't want to do anything that would have been out of character for Walter."

Walter Hyatt released two solo albums — King Tears and Music Town — during his all-too-short lifetime. The new Some Unfinished Business, Vol. 1 album collects some of his final recordings, augmented by performances from Jerry Douglas, David Ball, The Jordanaires, Riders In The Sky, Allison Moorer and other singers and musicians.

'Unfinished Business'

The result of those sessions is an album called Some Unfinished Business, Vol. 1, out today on King Tears Music, a label overseen by Hyatt's wife, Heidi Hyatt. Two of the songs date from Hyatt's days in acclaimed trio Uncle Walt's Band (a group that included David Ball and Champ Hood). Three songs, "I'll Come Knocking," "Babes In The Woods" and "Lonely In Love," were recorded by Lovett, and "Going To New Orleans" was recorded by Buck Jones. The other six compositions will be surprises even to many ardent fans.

"After you lose someone, you try to find every photograph, and every other little thing," Heidi Hyatt said.

"And people kept bringing recordings to me, things he'd worked on at various studios, in various stages of incompletion. There were songs on there that I'd never heard before: They must have been extremely fresh."

It took years before she was able to listen to the recordings, much less begin formulating a plan for releasing them.

"About the five-year point, I got to where I could listen," she said.

"It was painful, but also helpful. I don't know how other people get over something like this, and I still weep for the fact that he's not here. But something about the 10-year mark really made a difference. If I think about Walter too much, it can be hard. But if I think about the music, I'm very happy. This a joyous celebration of him."

Artist hard to define

The album's music underscores Hyatt's versatility as a singer and songwriter. The elegant, complex, jazz-tinged melody of "The Standoff" stands alongside the plaintive "I'll Come Knocking," the bluegrass-fused "Deeper Than Love" and the soulful "Rollin' My Blues." Hyatt's songs were, and are, inherently impossible to define, a fact that was part of the charm and appeal and also part of his trouble in marketing to the niche-happy music market.

"In (producer) Michael Killen, I was so fortunate to find the guy who heard this right," said Heidi Hyatt.

"Lots of people hear Walter's music and want to flavor it with what appeals to them, but I think Michael really heard what Walter was. We could have put these recordings out with just his voice and guitar, but Walter never intended them to be heard that way. That might have been a nice record for his fans, but it wouldn't have reached out any further. I've always wanted everyone to hear Walter's songs, because they're so beautiful. And I think what we have here sounds more like Walter than any of his other albums."

Pleasing to the spirit, then. And fully in character. Jerry Douglas needn't have worried.