It didn’t take Suzy Bogguss long to know Nashville was the town for her. She had cut a record in Peoria, Illinois, where she was working six nights a week in bars, listening rooms, and supper clubs. She and two friends wanted to see what Nashville was all about, so after work one evening, they drove all night long to get there and shared a hotel room.
“The first thing we woke up to,” said Bogguss, “was the Ralph Emery Show, and we said, ‘In Nashville they have live music at five o’clock in the morning! This is the town for me!’” All three ended up living in Nashville at one time or the other, but Bogguss was the first to move down. At the time, she had almost nine months of shows booked. She had a camper truck and was working in ski resorts and coffee houses. “That’s what took me so long.”
In Nashville, Suzy bought a map of the stars’ homes and dropped off copies of her album, stopping at Johnny Cash’s house and Buck White’s. She says Barbara Mandrell’s husband even let her in the house.
“Right after that, I went to Mexico with a group of guys who had a record deal with RCA there. When we stopped in Texas, Ricky Skaggs was playing. I went up to him, of course, to put my record on the stage, and he said, ‘I already have that one.’ He had married Sharon White, and she had the album and kept it. It gave me a little fuel for the fire that said I’ve got to get to Nashville and get started. All these signs just seemed like I was supposed to be there.”
Bogguss moved to Nashville permanently in 1985 but worked a six-month period at Dollywood the first season it opened.
“I got to open some concerts for Dolly, which was unbelievable. I shook like a leaf, but, boy, it was good experience. Dolly was so kind and supportive of all of the people who worked at the park and made sure we knew it was up to us what songs we sang and what kind of show we put on and encouraged us to do some of our own songs. She was a great mentor, and it was a great launching board,” says Bogguss.
Bogguss met Jim Foglesong of Capitol Records at that time. “He came down to hear me at Dollywood and that’s how I got my record deal. I had a meeting there with Dolly in her apartment and she said, ‘Jim Foglesong is such a gentleman. He’ll never hurt you. You can trust him and he’ll never put you in a bad situation.’”
She called the generosity of spirit one of the beautiful things about our community in Nashville. “Even people that don’t live here but do their business out of Nashville because they prefer the style here are welcome. Garth can live in Oklahoma if he wants to and still be a member of the community here, and that’s a beautiful thing,” Suzy said. She recalls her early days in town, running around from one publisher to another looking for songs and hanging out with Lipscomb and Belmont grads working in the publishing field before Music Row started to clear out.
“Patty Loveless and Laurie White were good friends of mine when we were starting out together, and then I met Kathy Mattea when I got my record deal. It was fun hanging out and getting to scoop on who was the hot new songwriter,” she said.
While for a time Suzy Bogguss was associated with 90s country music, she’s always perfomed a wide range of music. Asked how she identifies her genre, Bogguss explained, “I always had a good dose of folk in my music. I cut my teeth on more of the country rock era with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou, but I always love Dolly and Barbara Mandrell and the old stuff–Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. That stuff was in all my first sets when I was putting together who I was going to be musically. But Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson and people like that grew up on a hodgepodge of different music in their house like me. I had three siblings, and my mom was into big band era and class pop–Doris Day and Ray Charles–so I still do a lot of blues and swing-type music. I was active in folk music when I moved to Nashville, so it’s all mish-moshed in there.”
When she first moved to Nashville, she recalls, people were calling country music Americana. “At that time Ricky Skaggs was bringing in his bluegrade edge, and the O’Kane’s were bringing in their funky acoustic music. Reba was having songs like “How Blue Can You Make Me?” and then Patty Loveless and I came out at a similar time with some traditional country before we added in some of our other influences from the country rock years.”
During the pandemic, Bogguss has had an opportunity to go back into her archives to listen at the breadth of her work. For 22 weeks, she’s been streaming what she calls “Wine Down Wednesday,” so she’s been listening to her own deep tracks.
“It’s a Facebook thing I do on Instagram for just a half hour. I sing two songs, maybe three, and take questions. I try to shake it up a little,” she says. I’ve been going back to learn these old songs people are requesting. I had forgotten about these great old chestnuts.”
She was also getting ready for an hour-long show, singing some songs she did before she came to Nashville–”folkier stuff.” Admitting she’s never been a “good practicer,” she says she’d much rather go do a gig and practice songs on people. She points out that the discipline of playing every week has helped her keep her voice strong and to sharpen her guitar skills, since she doesn’t have a guitarist with her filling in the sound. She’s also including some guest artists on the Wednesday shows, starting with Pam Tillis.
In conjunction with Time/Life, Bogguss has just released a digital version of her 2001 recording Live at Caffee Milano, a project she says “just full out of the sky.” She also has a Christmas album in the works with Time/Life to be released at the end of October that will have some of the fun holidays songs, such as “The Grinch.”
What made her say yes to releasing the live album was the special experience playing in this venue. She pointed out that since it was a small place with maybe a hundred or so seats, almost everyone in the audience was right up front, part of the show. She says the interaction comes through on the recording, “really being in the moment.” Now, says Bogguss, “people are loving to hear live music because whenever something is scare, really hard to come by, you want it.”
The album includes some of Suzy Bogguss’ best-loved songs, “Someday Soon,” written by Ian Tyson; fan favorite “Hey, Cinderella,” which she co-wrote with Gary Harrison and Matraca Berg; and “Just Like the Weather,” which she co-wrote with her husband Doug Crider. The tracks also include her interpretations of “Night Rider’s Lament” and John Hiatt’s “Drive South.”
A songwriter in her own right, she says, “I certainly don’t shy away from covering songs that I love as a singer, and I don’t feel like I have to write everything. Sometimes I hear a song and think, ‘I want to sing that, and I don’t know how in the world that I could ever say that better.’ That doesn’t intimidate me unless it’s something like a Linda Ronstadt hit. I couldn’t bring myself to do that. That’s the definitive version.”
In conjunction with the release of Life in the Milano, Bogguss has released a new lyrics video version of “Hey, Cinderella” on YouTube. Her husband came up with the concept, using several retro television sets, simultaneously showing images from the original video and other clips from her archives, aligning the images to the song.
Bogguss looks back with gratitude to her early days in Nashville, having TNN “keeping us in people’s faces constantly, so they got to know our personalities. We got to be ourselves because we were on with Ralph and Crook and Chase so much we couldn’t help being friends.” She has managed to stay connected with her fans during the shutdown through a subscription for diehard fans. They get behind-the-scenes peeks, and they get the songs before anyone else.
“I’m responsible to these people, so I like to find something cool that hasn’t been released to anyone else or something I’ve been working on in the studio. It’s like being a VIP member. I do live chats with them that I don’t do with anybody else on social media.”
Bogguss looks forward to getting back to live performances. Before the shutdown, she was touring with Pam Tillis and Terri Clark, which they plan to continue. She finds playing festivals with them fun and energetic, but still loves the three- to five-hundred seat theaters and listening rooms like the Birchmere in DC or the Ram’s Head, a supper club in Annapolis, Maryland.
“There are so many beautiful old theaters that have been renovated in cities around the country where they’ve added culture back into the downtown areas. People go out to dinner and then to these shows.” She says she recently saw pictures of these venues empty in a video her husband put together. “I cried like a baby; I miss it so much.”
Looking ahead, she says she hopes once people feel safe, they’ll be so starved for live entertainment, they’ll go out every weekend.
“Tell people to save up!”