Songs from a Loose Shingle

By Jay Codes.

Lacy J. Dalton breathes some freshness into the country air

Jill Byrem, just out of high school in Bloomsburg, Pa., could draw, sing a little and see a future of limited possibilities. Like no job at the end of the summer. Like few friends left in town once they took off for college. She was, she recalls now, desperate.

She found an application for Brigham Young University, the Mormon school in Provo, Utah, and sent it in "because it wasn't expensive." She was accepted, and borrowed $200 from her grandmother to get there. Her favorite class was art. Jill thought she could be "one of the great ones, painting masterpieces." The students were told to draw a barn, and the results were displayed. Jill checked them out, feeling more confident about her own gifts as she went along. Then she saw one "that shook me like wheels spinning. It was art, far better than mine. It showed a loose shingle on the barn roof and a cobweb in the field. I'd missed those details that added insight to the picture. I realized I lacked the genius to see more than other eyes."

Well, maybe she cannot see it.

But almost a decade and a half later, with a new life and a new name --Jill Byrem of Bloomsburg is now Lacy J. Dalton of Santa Cruz, Calif. --she can start to sing about it. Her first album, which has sold well since Columbia issued it in March, is full of rue, muscle and hot sauce. Lacy J. works country territory, but with the bright sass and brass of a newcomer bound to make a mark. Those easygoing steel guitars and refrains about wrung-dry love affairs start to sound like clarion calls when Lacy dresses them for action. With a great many folks already getting her message. Columbia plans to release a second Dalton album in September, and the Academy of Country Music has given her its Top New Female Vocalist award.

Dalton has a husky, late-night and last-drink voice that can curl under and caress a ballad, or slide, like a gravity knife, to a quick sharp point that draws blood from a backbeat. She writes, or co-writes, most of her material, making sure to stash away in the lyrics plenty of shingles and cobwebs, like the recollection of "ol' Dottie" in her Beer Drinkin' Song:

Down at the truck stop

Been there since we were sixteen

The only thing different, 20 years

later Is the hip size on ol'Dottie's jeans.

What Dalton describes as her "waltz for the malt" style has enough bleary good humor and lazy musical charm that one could imagine it sung by both outlaws like Waylon Jennings and slickers like Kenny Rogers. Although she calls her music "progressive," her best songs are little nuggets in the rushing middle of the country mainstream. If Lacy's performing and writing are not of themselves unique, together they are formidable, a fact acknowledged by Billy Sherrill, CBS Records vice president and executive producer in Nashville. "There are a lot of good singers out there, but there aren't that many good writers," he points out. "I think Lacy's potential can get her to the top of the country field, and then beyond."

Dalton is 33, which is practically Geritol territory by music-biz standards. But her years have allowed her to absorb some of the hard knocks and low blows that give a good old country tune perspective. She grew up in the hills of east-central Pennsylvania, on the fringes of the mining belt. Her father was a guide on a hunting preserve ("He was a good shot. I grew up eating venison"). Her mother, trained as a beautician, worked counters at local truck stops. During long evenings at home, her father played guitar, mandolin and banjo, and her mother sang while she and her younger sister Randy sat back at the kitchen table and listened. "It was strictly country," she says. "I loved the songs more than the singing. Country music is a storytelling art."

It took her a while to gather up some stories to tell. After just a few months at Brigham Young, she hitched northeast to Minnesota and got a job as a short-order cook in a joint where she could sing when business was slow. She dyed her sandy hair black, put on some weight and tried to sing like Joan Baez. "I sang foul, I looked foul," she says. Her folks found her and brought her home.

"I was up to 180 pounds and my shoe size had grown by two. My mom kept looking at my feet and crying, and she didn't stop 'til we got to Bloomsburg."

Back there, she drifted through a couple of jobs, then drifted away again with a guitar player she met at the county fair. They settled in Santa Cruz, and formed a rock band that allowed her to play around in a rubbed-raw Janis Joplin style. After she married the band's manager, her luck turned all bad. He broke his neck in a diving accident and was paralyzed for three years. The band broke up. Her father died.

She, her husband and their small son Adam survived on $350 in food stamps and relief a month. Then in 1974 her husband died.

To make extra money, she started singing in clubs, late gigs to which she'd bring little Adam.

Then some musician friends chipped in to make a record, which she mailed to a lawyer friend in Los Angeles. He decided to manage her and sent a demo tape to CBS Records. Within a month Lacy J. was signed by Sherrill and on her way.

With her first coast-to-coast tour just completed, Lacy now seems ready to fly, as she sings, "high like an angel." Her flight plan is at once hardheaded and mystical.

"Sometimes a song comes to me in a dream," she says. "I hear chords I don't know, then a voice says I don't practice enough because if I did I'd recognize them." However lofty Dalton's trajectory, it. will likely remain solidly grounded in some old lessons. "I don't care if some one sings better or writes better songs," she says. "I don't have absolute standards for my music. It's all something personal, and not competitive. The first time I learned that was seeing that painting of the barn." That's a lot of good music from one loose shingle.

Reported by Dean Brelis/New York

With reporting by Dean Brelis

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