“From the moment I was first exposed to music, I was into it. My dad used to talk about how when I was two years old, I could do a spot-on vocal impersonation of Ronnie Millsap. And while that may have been a bit of a stretch (like many of his tales), it does sound like something I would have at least attempted to do.”
“But my first real memories of music were quite literally given to me by my mom, Judy Crawley (Robinson). In the late ’60s and early ’70s, my mom was a bit of a rising star in the unassuming, church-packed town of Cleveland, Tennessee. She was a fantastic singer, somewhere between a southern Karen Carpenter and Anne Murray, but more dynamic, more piercing in the upper register. She and my sax-virtuoso uncle Tommy had both signed with a small Nashville-area label called Chart Records. Seemingly unbeknownst to most everyone involved, for that brief moment, some really magical stuff was happening in that little speck of the deep south.
My mom would track songs written by would-be heroes of the great Muscle Shoals Sound not long before they fled to south Alabama to take over the music industry. A couple of my mom’s singles were picked up by radio stations scattered around the country. She briefly moved to Nashville and, before long, found herself hanging out in historic studios with the likes of Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed.
But nearly as quickly as it began, life’s priorities changed and it all just sort of stopped on a dime. She married young, divorced, re-married, had me, and her brief affair with the industry remained captured only on those circular, black time capsules that eventually wound up buried in my grandmother’s basement.
When I was maybe five, I found a copy of my mom’s first single on Chart, “My April Morning.” It was really something to me. The opening jangle of the guitar, the borderline distortion of the vocal coming through the single speaker of my little blue fold-up suitcase record player. I sat there, just a kid, hearing my mother’s dreams vividly etched in vinyl, replaying themselves over and over, never losing their intensity.
The b-side was a song called “Childhood Dreams,” written by another hometown hero and future Shoals keyboardist, Tim Henson. His dreams were alive in those grooves too. The opening of the song had an almost Charlie Brown-like lightness to it. It felt like a joyful upbeat thing with lyrics about Tootsie Rolls and Superman. I loved it.
When I started seriously playing my own music in college, I came back to these 7″ singles and that song in particular. The last line of the song, “God help me to be a child again,” really hit me differently than it did when I was a kindergartener. The song was downright sad. I played the songs for my musician friends. The reaction was always the same, “That’s your mom!?”, they’d ask, stunned. My mom and I shared—and still share —a love for melancholy song-fare.
A couple of years ago, I came back to those singles yet again, finally digitizing them and uploading them to the web. I mainly just wanted to better archive and honor my mom’s music and give her the opportunity to easily share the songs with people who might not have a turntable.
A freelance writer friend of mine, Sean Maloney, stumbled upon these recordings after I shared them on Facebook. He heard the crackle of the vinyl, that Mamas & Papas-esque jangly guitar that was imprinted on my brain, and of course, that powerful voice.
He freaked out.
He pitched a story to the editor at Bandcamp, which was immediately approved on the merits of the music alone. He interviewed my mom, interviewed me, sent a professional photographer to my mom’s house, wrote what is definitely her quintessential bio, and got a giant photo of her on the site’s main landing page under the headline “The Lost Career of Judy Crawley.” It made her freaking life.
And it was all because of those records. It was those dreams and real moments and chords and melodies and memories captured in time and saved for nearly 50 years on plastic discs.
As a kid, I’d go on to damn near burn a hole in my 45 of the Ghostbusters theme, eventually becoming a cassette kid as the vinyl format all but died. But it was my mom’s records that really stuck with me. I still have a box of them in my humble home studio. Whenever I’m working on a song, chasing those ever-elusive words and melodies, I’m never far from those archives of inspiration. And I never will be.”
—Aaron Robinson
Pale Houses’ “Songs of the Isolation” limited edition 12″ vinyl EP with bonus tracks arrives in stores on May 10, 2018 and digitally on March 30, 2018.
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