Artists:James Talley

James Talley is an Oklahoma born folk-country-blues singer/songwriter, whose career now spans over thirty-five years. Author David McGee has called James' vision of the American experience "startlingly original." His name has been mentioned alongside Woody Guthrie, Merle Haggard and Bob Dylan, and praised for the quality of his songwriting and wise, expressive voice. As a youth, his family moved from their home state of Oklahoma to the state of Washington, where his father worked as a chemical operator in the now infamous Hanford plutonium factory. After five years in Richland, Washington, and realizing the hazards his father's employment presented, the family relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the rich tri-cultured environment of the Southwest. After graduating from the University of New Mexico with a degree in fine arts, James, after encouragement from Pete Seeger, began to write songs that drew upon the culture of the Southwest he had experienced growing up. These early songs eventually became The Road To Torre'n, a saga of life and death in the Chicano villages of northern New Mexico. These powerful songs sat on the shelf in Nashville until the German Bear Family Records finally released the project in a beautiful box set edition 1992, over twenty years after it was originally written. It is a moving collaboration of photography and music, akin to James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with a photographic essay by James' lifelong friend, renound photographer Cavalliere Ketchum. Although never released in the United States, it is still available as an import at Amazon.com.

In 1968 James moved from New Mexico to Nashville, Tennessee to try and get his songs recorded. He soon discovered, however, that the commercial music business was not attuned to that kind of honesty.

James performed twice at The White House for President Jimmy Carter, and at the Smithsonian Institution, and other concert venues around the United States and in Europe. B.B. King played guitar on James' third album, Blackjack Choir, in 1976, marking the first time the legendary bluesman had ever recorded in Nashville. Johnny Cash, Johnny Paycheck, Alan Jackson, Hazel Dickens, the late Gene Clark, and most recently Moby, among others, have recorded his songs.