Harlan Howard: Three Chords and the Truth

Harlan Howard once summed up an entire genre in six words: country music, he said, is "three chords and the truth." It's one of the most quoted lines in Nashville, repeated so often it's practically become the industry's own mission statement. It's also, more usefully for a songwriter, a fair description of how Howard actually wrote. He didn't dress a lyric up. He found the plainest true sentence available and trusted it to do the work.

That's a harder discipline than it sounds. Plenty of writers reach for the clever line, the unexpected image, the turn of phrase that shows the audience how hard they worked. Howard's catalogue, more than 4,000 songs written over six decades, argues for the opposite instinct: strip the idea down until nothing's left but what's true, and let that carry the song.

A childhood with no room for anything but plain speech

Howard was born in Detroit in 1927 and lost his father young; he grew up an orphan, shuffled through a string of foster homes on farms across Michigan and Kentucky. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade and went to work as a laborer, and by twelve he was already writing his own songs, mostly for himself, with no real path yet toward Nashville. What he had, instead of formal schooling or industry connections, was the Grand Ole Opry on the radio and an ear tuned early to what a plainspoken country lyric actually sounded like.

It's a useful thing to know if you assume you need the right background or the right city to start writing seriously. Howard didn't have either. He had a difficult childhood and a radio, and he started writing songs anyway, years before anyone was paying him for them.

Los Angeles first, then Nashville, and an explosive run

Howard moved to Los Angeles in 1955, reasoning that if songwriting didn't pan out there were always factory jobs to fall back on. It worked out. Early breaks with singers Tex Ritter and Johnny Bond got his songs recorded, and by the late 1950s he was placing hits regularly, including "Heartaches by the Number," a number one for Ray Price in 1959 that also crossed over to the pop charts in a version by Guy Mitchell.

In 1960, with his catalogue building fast, Howard moved to Nashville with his wife, singer Jan Howard, and settled into what became the most productive stretch of his career. In 1961 alone, he reportedly had as many as fifteen songs simultaneously sitting in the country Top 40, a run few songwriters in any genre have matched before or since.

Writing the songs other people's careers were built on

Howard's songs weren't just hits, they became some of the defining recordings of the artists who sang them. "I Fall to Pieces," co-written with Hank Cochran, gave Patsy Cline a number one in 1961 and remains one of the most recognizable vocal performances in country music. "Busted," a stark, first-person account of a broke farmer looking for work, became a hit for Johnny Cash in 1963 and, the same year, for Ray Charles, whose version won a Grammy. Buck Owens recorded a dozen Howard songs for a 1961 tribute album, "Buck Owens Sings Harlan Howard," including "Above and Beyond" and "Foolin' Around."

What connects those songs, sung by artists as different as Cline, Cash, and Charles, is that none of them needed Howard's original phrasing explained or softened for their own voice. The lyric was already plain enough to fit whoever sang it. That's not an accident. It's what happens when a writer refuses to let a clever line get between the singer and the truth of the song.

Regulars at Tootsies, trading songs and standards

Through the early 1960s, Howard was part of a loose circle of Nashville songwriters, including Hank Cochran, Roger Miller, and a young Willie Nelson, who gathered regularly at Tootsies Orchid Lounge near the Ryman Auditorium, trading songs, opinions, and, by most accounts, a fair amount of drink. Patsy Cline, who'd recorded "I Fall to Pieces," was part of that same circle before her death in a 1963 plane crash. It wasn't a formal songwriting camp. It was a bar, full of people who took the craft seriously enough to argue about it after hours, which is probably as good a description of a real songwriting community as any.

A song still finding new hits a decade after it was written

"The Chokin' Kind," written by Howard, first became a country hit for Waylon Jennings in 1967. Two years later, R&B singer Joe Simon recorded his own version, and it became his first number one on the R&B chart and won him a Grammy in 1970. It's a good example of something worth remembering about a genuinely plain, well-built song: it doesn't stay locked to one genre or one artist's original arrangement. A true lyric and a strong melody can cross into a completely different sound a decade later and still land.

What's worth taking from his career

Howard was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1973 and the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1977, with a formal induction into the latter's ranks confirmed in 1997. He kept writing into his final years, working with younger artists including Nanci Griffith, k.d. lang, and Patty Loveless, still turning out songs simple enough for anyone to sing.

He once said his songs were like his children, and that he cared more about matching a song to the right artist than about keeping credit for himself. It's a generous way to think about the work, and it lines up with everything else about how he wrote: the song mattered more than the writer's fingerprints on it. If you're chasing a line that sounds impressive and forgetting whether it's actually true, Harlan Howard's catalogue is the reminder that three chords and the truth is usually enough. If you've got the truth and need someone who can find the three chords to carry it, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Songwriters Hall of Fame: Harlan Howard, American Songwriter: On This Day in 2002, We Said Goodbye to Harlan Howard, Wide Open Country: Harlan Howard, Wikipedia: Busted (Harlan Howard song), Wikipedia: The Chokin' Kind, Rolling Stone: Country Scribe Harlan Howard Dies