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The Story of ‘Black Sky’

A Tribute to Steve Cash (1946-2019) of The Ozark Mountain Daredevils

Michael Kuelker

Steve Cash, a founding member of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, died on October 13 in Springfield, Missouri. Cash, 73, was an integral part of the Daredevils’ albums for A&M Records in the 1970s helping to define country-rock music of the era, composing or co-writing many of the OMD’s best loved songs including “If You Wanna Get to Heaven,” “Chicken Train,” “Jackie Blue,” “It’ll Shine When It Shines,” “Southern Cross” and “Black Sky.” In the decades since then, through high tide and low tide, Cash remained a Daredevil, playing harp, singing and writing lyrics.

Though Cash had been beset with health problems in the last few years, he still performed with the band, missing shows rarely. In 2017 he was fresh enough from the hospital for a performance in West Plains, Missouri that he still had the hospital bracelet on his wrist. Cash’s last concert appearances were in November 2018 when the Daredevils did their annual weekend of shows at Wildwood Springs Lodge in Steelville, Missouri. The Daredevils carry on with two founding members, John Dillon and Michael ‘Supe’ Granda, and a strong supporting cast drawn from the deep ranks of the Springfield music scene. Cash was all-in on the sessions that produced the Daredevils’ most recent albums, the musically potent Off the Beaten Path (2017) and Heaven 20/20 (2019). Apart from music, he was a painter and a writer of science fiction whose trilogy The Meq was published in the 2000s.

“Black Sky,” one of Steve Cash’s most consequential songs, was among his first as a songwriter. When the 1970s dawned, he was a poet not a musician and he’d published a chapbook, Dharma Berries, as a capstone to his time in San Francisco in the late 1960s circulating among poets and hippies. The title poem was published by Rolling Stone magazine (Feb. 4, 1971), a fact that Cash never recalled without adding that the magazine never paid him. His aspirations were largely in literature until he befriended future Daredevil John Dillon, who introduced him to the harmonica. They began writing together, and the two went on to produce many titles under the authorship Cash/Dillon.

“Black Sky” proved to be catalytic for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. It was the first song of the band’s to attract attention from a record label, it appeared on the debut album and it was regularly performed in concert. Powered by harp, “Black Sky” has a sultry rhythm and sublime lyrics deriving from Cash’s interest in eastern thought and in the writing of ‘place.’

Well, I sure take it with me wherever I go

And you might like to see it but it never does show

Like a wind in the valley that never does blow

Like the grass in the back you never did mow

It's a black sky formin' on the ridge

It's a woman waitin' standin' on the bridge

It's the price that you pay for walkin' on the ledge

It's everythin' you do and nothin' that you did

And after the koan-like last line, the slinky rhythm kicks back in. There is something intoxicating about the way the song moves, how it gets in your head this idea of “everything you do, nothing that you did,” the presentness of the present moment. “Black Sky” always plays, in concert and in the mind, to rousing effect.

John Dillon told me in a 2014 interview, “‘Black Sky’ sort of set the precedent. Steve didn’t come from a musical background, so his timing sometimes is not correct in a way, not musically correct. Instead of trying to correct that, we’ll just push it and use it. So it becomes something that’s visceral.

“A lot of primitive mountain people will do that. They’ll jump [musical] time and you’ll go ‘wow,’ but that’s how they play. They’re not schooled. They’re skilled but they’re not schooled.

“Whenever that happened, I went, well god, he’s the real thing. He hadn’t studied anything, it’s all just coming from the dirt, you know, so let’s just keep that. ‘Black Sky’ – not only did it set us up but in a lot of ways it’s a song that says a lot about who we are as a band.”

Michael ‘Supe’ Granda struck a similar chord in an interview with me in the days after Cash’s death. “Steve was never in any bands before the Daredevils,” said Granda, “but his contribution to the creative mix of the band was substantial and rock solid. He was the greatest lyricist I’ve ever heard.

“If I ever painted myself into a lyrical corner, I knew I could call Steve Cash and he would help smooth out the lyrics. He would help anyone. Case in point is ‘Jackie Blue,’” said Granda, referring to the Daredevils’ biggest hit single. Co- written and sung by Larry Lee, “Jackie Blue” peaked on the charts in the spring of 1975 with its melodious hook, soulfully smooth vocal and story of a melancholy lady (“everyday in your indigo eyes / I watch the sun set but I don’t see it rise”).

The Daredevils had an outpouring of songs from multiple singers and songwriters. With a sublime and arresting vocal blend, the band could pivot from style to style musically.

Some of that aural texture came from Cash’s Hohner blues harps. Self-taught, Cash developed a style that is hard to emulate. Country blues player Sonny Terry is the best and closest antecedent. There was something painterly about the way Cash conjured sound. Rural and swampy, Cash’s harp chugged on the power numbers and, depending on the needs of the song, it sang, it blared, it streaked the sky with the arabesques of a distant unidentifiable bird.

From Family Tree to OMD

In late 1971, singer-songwriter-guitarist Randle Chowning called together a couple of people he was running into in the Springfield music scene to see if they were interested in original music. Springfield had drawn musicians for the mighty KWTO radio station and for Ozark Jubilee, which deepened the pool of talent in the area but also set the agenda for pop and country. Chowning recalled the scene being staid for performing artists of his ilk.

“I was really trying to write songs and not do covers,” said Chowning in 2015. “Everybody in the area here was all doing covers. There were a few songwriters but at that time in this area you couldn’t go out and draw a crowd playing original material. You had to do, you know, the latest Top 40 songs to be hired at clubs. There were very few clubs as well. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity. And if you played for fraternity parties, which we used to do around here, they also wanted

to hear stuff they were familiar with. So it was very difficult as songwriters to get any gigs where you could actually go play your original music.

“Larry [Lee], I knew he played drums, I knew he wrote songs, and we had loosely met each other through the clubs around town. I kept getting back to him, ‘Hey, let’s get together one day.’ Same case with John Dillon. He was a very visible songwriter and different from what other people were doing.

“Eventually the three of us sat down. I think two or three times it was just the three of us on acoustic guitars. One day I said, ‘I met this guy over on campus from St. Louis that plays bass. You mind if he comes and sits in?’ And that was Supe [Granda]. I invited Supe over to sit in. Steve Cash was a friend of John’s and he invited him over. So the room started to get crowded. [Chowning laughs.] Nobody said, ‘don’t come back next time.’ [He laughs again.] So we very loosely went from that to on stage.

The configuration cohered around Chowning, Lee, Dillon, Cash, Granda and, soon, Buddy Brayfield on keyboards and oboe. Dubbed Family Tree, they rehearsed and performed at a counterculture-friendly venue in Springfield called the New Bijou Theater. It is Buddy Brayfield doing the deep low end vocal part on the “everything you do” chorus of “Black Sky.”

There was magic happening in this songwriter circle.

Supe Granda recalled, “When the band first started, the first song he showed us was ‘Black Sky.’ And I went ‘oh my god, this is monumental.’ My favorite line in the whole song is, ‘like the grass in the back you never did mow,’ I went, ‘man, who would think of that first of all?’ And second of all, it’s just a perfect line. This is before we heard anything else. Before ‘If You Wanna Get to Heaven’ was written, even before ‘Chicken Train,’ he showed us ‘Black Sky.’

“It’s just a two-chord ditty because he wasn’t real musical but he was extremely lyrical. I thought, this guy’s got the goods. ‘Hey, you got another song?’ ‘Yeah, I got a couple.’ And that’s when he took his place right there on the stage next to the rest of us as an equal, legitimate, just extremely confident band member.”

In 1972 a demo of “Black Sky” came to the attention of Columbia Records’ John Hammond when Steve Canaday, an associate of the band, charm-powered his way into a spontaneous office meeting with the famed producer. Canaday had co-owned the New Bijou Theater; he later became a member of the Daredevils. Hammond, who had worked with such seminal artists as Robert Johnson, Bob

Dylan and Aretha Franklin, had been reading a newspaper with his back to the door when he asked that the demo tape be played. According to Canaday, “Black Sky” made him put his newspaper down and ask about the song.

Years later Cash told me, “Steve Canaday started apologizing, ‘well, that guy is not really a singer...’ Trying, you know, to hedge the thing. And then John Hammond just stopped him and said, ‘hey, Woody Guthrie couldn’t sing.’ So I thought that was pretty cool.”

Hammond underwrote a demo recording session in July 1972 at American Artists studio in Springfield. Larry Lee recalled it for me in 2015. “Essentially, John Hammond sent down a producer named Michael Sunday – never heard of him since – to go in the studio with us to record more things and probably in a better quality. His idea was he was gonna get ‘Black Sky’ and maybe two or three other songs. Just a short little thing. And we’re going, hey, if we’re going into a studio, we’ll record everything we know. So we were in there for 13 hours and recorded 25 songs [he laughs]. That turned into The Lost Cabin Sessions.”

That’s the name for this one-after-another studio fecundity – The Lost Cabin Sessions – a bracing document of the band in its early flowering, an essential release in the OMD discography1. The depth and range of the material, the songwriting ingenuity, the compelling voices, four of them singing lead, all of them singing together – a signpost of Big Things to Come.

But not immediately. Hammond wound up not signing the band to Columbia. But the recording session he had just financed became part of a slipstream of energy that soon earned the Daredevils a deal with A&M and deposited them in London, England at Olympic Studios to be produced by Glyn Johns and David Anderle. Johns had already achieved feats of greatness engineering and producing for the Who, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. The two albums Johns produced with Anderle – the debut and the follow-up, It’ll Shine When It Shines, cut largely at the band’s rehearsal ‘ranch’ near Boliver, Missouri – remain vitalizing touchstones of country-rock. The band earned a forever fan base with these and many other works in the years to come.

1 “Black Sky” doesn’t happen to be on The Lost Cabin Sessions (neither the 1985 edition on LP nor the expanded edition on CD in 2003). “Black Sky,” you see, assumes the form of a trickster in this discography, bearing force, causing an effect and darting out of view ... and then taking different form. Circa 1971 “Black Sky” had been adapted for a radio jingle used by the auto dealer Stinger Sam in Springfield MO. The audio of this is long lost. We also don’t have the “Black Sky” demo that John Hammond heard. It is not ‘extant.’

“Black Sky,” which helped set this energy in motion, comes from deep Ozarks. Before the Daredevils made their mark on the music world, before the hit singles and the nearly half century of road shows and the hardscrabble life of an independent band – before any of that there was a guy with long hair and an affinity to west coast beat poetry by Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Lew Welch. Living way out.

Smackout: Steve Cash in His Own Words

I was living at a place called Smackout2, which was halfway between Seymour and Ivy on Highway K. We lived in this place that we had to clean out when we moved in there. No running water. Just a buncha hippies, four guys, and the house was a general store when the tomato canning business was a boom around Ava, Missouri, way down in Booger County as they call it [official name: Douglas County]. People would say, Got any pork chops in there? ‘Nope, I’m smack out.’ He said it so often that they just started calling the building Smack-out. It was on this guy’s property and we were gonna repair a fence for him and do some odd work. Basically we were just gonna live there for free.

When we were cleaning that place out, I found a receipt book that said, “E E Lawson.’ He’s the guy that had the general store. ‘Eggs, chicks, chicks, hens.’ I said, ‘Someday, someday, there’s a song there.’ [It became “E.E. Lawson” on the OMD’s It’ll Shine When It Shines album (A&M 1974).]

While we were living there, there wasn’t anything to do – just feed the wood stove, hang out, smoke a joint or something; that’s about what we did, and look for something to eat. There was a lot of time on our hands. I wrote the lyrics to that one afternoon and just was kinda stomping with my foot and playing a real skeletal version on the harp, just to get the measure and stuff like that.

There was a woman that I was after that was not after me, and that was disappointing and so that was in there [in the lyrics]. But then also I’d lived in Berkeley for a year or so and met a lot of poets and studied poetry and that meant a lot of me, and to John as well. And so I was trying to write a lyric where the images were clear, concise and dramatic so you could take what you wanted to out of it, just like a good poem. Each verse has got that unique combination of rhymes and images to come up with something that’s kinda like an existential

2 Smackout is an informal but commonly used place name. By the way, on the Arkansas side of the Ozarks is a place officially called Smackover.

thing in a way ... I don’t want to get too heavy with it here but ... it’s also very swampy, the ‘coon dogs’ and all that stuff was right where I was living at the time and all that stuff was really happening. I was just using what was around me, what was available in those images.

I wrote it straight out in one afternoon, just wrote verse after verse. So it could be about a lot of things: ‘It’s everything you do and nothing that you did’ is a line that could ... what do you mean by that? I don’t want to explain it too much because you could take it two or three different ways but what I mean by that, it comes down to an existential situation where each moment is each moment, you better get it. It’s not what you did. It’s right now.

We’d come into Springfield about once every two weeks and I’d run into John occasionally. I played it for him, I don’t know where. [John Dillon interjected, “I think we worked it up at Tim’s Pizza,” where Dillon performed weekly for $20 and free beer and pizza.] It was rudimentary to say the least. And still is. That’s what I like about it. John heard it and said, ‘okay, we’re doing that.’ What? I’d never been in a band or anything. ‘We’re gonna do that’ and so we did.

He got a gig at Drury [University] right after that. It was in the afternoon... [Dillon added, “It was a student union and it was a peace initiative of some sort, ‘stop the war’.”] He said ‘come on down, we’ll do ‘Black Sky.’’ I just said, what? ‘Yeah, yeah, it’d be cool.’

And ... I’d never played in my life in front of people [Cash laughed] and I was so nervous doing that, the first time we ever did it live, that my legs were shaking like this [he demonstrated] and so I had to move around so you couldn’t see that going on. But we got through it, thanks to John, and people liked it right away, first time around!

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Michael Kuelker is a teacher and writer living in St. Louis, Missouri. He is finishing a book titled The Ozark Mountain Daredevils On Record: A Narrative Discography and this article is the first appearance of the manuscript’s previously unpublished interview material.