Mike Hendrix first saw Jimmy Stewart playing bass and fronting a band in Camden, Tennessee. One day Hendrix was pumping gas at a little station in Paris, Tennessee, where he lived. Stewart pulled in driving a Camaro. “I said, ‘Aren’t you the guy who played at the fair the other day?’ Turned out he lived in the same trailer park as I did.”
“I had a wife and a daughter,” he continues. “He had a wife and daughter. It was divinely inspired.”
Originally called Hit and Run, they later renamed themselves after the cigar box that doubled as the band’s cash box at gigs. Mostly still in their teens, they came from a world of fading factory jobs, blue-collar grit and generational poverty.
These guys were gifted musicians. It’s what they had in life.
Songwriter/guitarist Hendrix says, “We were always soaking wet too, we poured it all out on stage. We practiced every Tuesday and Thursday, and then we gigged four nights a week, all over the Southeast, the farthest was Illinois. And Jimmy was a perfectionist. He was a stickler, and it made us better. He believed in excellence, and still does. He was the true leader.” In places like West Tennessee, young men sometimes die in gruesome ways. Guitarist Ronny Waters was struck by a train, a ladder on a passing railcar caught him. It was ’77, a few months after the band released its one and only album. For the second pressing of the self-titled release, the band rechristened it To A Brother in tribute.
“I was in a daze for a while,” Hendrix says. “I just couldn’t get over it. We all loved each other.”
Hendrix had left for a spell, then rejoined. Beyond Hendrix, the band included Jimmy, his drummer brother Rickey, and guitarist Larry Farrar. With Ronny they were a three-guitar attack. The guitarist’s death stunted TRC’s momentum as their music was just getting noticed.
The indie album, recorded in rural Puryear, Tennessee, is all flesh, blood and bones. It’s shockingly good in that earned bar-band way—tight musicality and harmonies forged in endless regional dance hall and bar gigs, where unruly crowds demanded covers, which they did.
It’s the same route the Marshall Tucker Band, the Outlaws and Skynyrd traveled. This is mid-’70s Southern Rock based on fine songcraft and a great rock ’n’ roll singer in Stewart, who could sing a yarn as well as Ronnie Van Zandt. The anti-racist “We Are All Brothers” crossbreeds Grand Funk Railroad, Duane Allman and Southern R&B. The careening rhythmic pulse of “White Lightening” would cure any hangover while balancing lines like “That moonshine’s running through my veins/It’s in my heart and in my brain.” Cranked up campfire riffs and tortured blues licks make “Farmin’ Man” a heady little working-class anthem. (The latter two songs have become minor hits decades later thanks to Fervor Records landing significant syncs in film and TV.)
The band’s touring days wound down in the late ’70s. Some members revived TRC with seasoned musicians in 2011.
After moving to Nashville in ’84, Jimmy Stewart built a formidable songwriting career, penning hits for Toby Keith, Shania Twain, Hank Williams Jr., and many others. Hendrix writes, records and lives outside Nashville with his wife. Larry Farrar died in ’94. Tennessee River Crooks was as much about brotherhood as it was rock ’n’ roll. It’s still there in the music.
–Liner notes by Brian Jabas Smith
