On the Music of Jacob McCoy

Introduction

The bridge to David Ramirez's “New Way of Living” haunts me:

There’s a plumber down in Arkansas

The best writer that I ever met

When I asked where to find his CD

He just laughed and lit a cigarette.

It's another instance of the phenomenon explored in Wilco’s “The Late Greats,” one example of which is that "the best band will never get signed." I write about it in the “Afterward” to my series about Joe Pug’s Sketch of a Promised Departure, but there’s more to be said.

If I hadn’t technically met Joe Pug (at his merch table, enough times that my friend Harrison said he’s surprised Joe Pug hasn’t taken a restraining order out on me), it would be easy to say the best writer I ever met lives in Arkansas. It would also be easy to say the best folk guitar player I've met lives there too. But this isn't the NFL draft and I'm not actually interested in ranking them; but I can tell you where to find this contender's CD. And his instagram page. (I’ve only stopped by Joe Pug’s merch table like maybe four times, by the way).

If you haven’t listened to Jacob McCoy's music, stop reading this and do it. I recommend “Questions,” “My Everything,” and his cover of MGMT’s “Electric Feel, and if you’re coming from more of a Red Dirt angle, check out “Freight Train” and “Don’t Blame Me.” 

I had the privilege of hearing McCoy when he was in college, and even then I could tell he had something special. I’d listened to a lot of music and played a lot of music with a lot of people, but I’d never been around someone of whom I could say without doubt that they had what it takes. It wasn’t surprising when I heard a guy who’d produced Noah Gunderson and The Native Sibling wanted to get him out to Brooklyn to produce an album. It also wasn’t really a surprise when I heard American Idol DM’d him and invited him to their tryouts in Nashville (only reason it was almost a surprise was that his music is way cooler than anything I’ve ever heard of being on American Idol). It wasn’t a surprise when I heard Lionel Richie and Luke Bryan saw him audition and told him he should move to Nashville and write songs. And it wasn’t really a surprise when he got the ultimate badge of honor which was Katy Perry, in the same audition, telling him she didn’t think he was American Idol material. (Incidentally, I think she was right–because his stuff, for lack of a better term, is too cool for American Idol–although Jacob obviously wasn’t too cool to try out.)

I’ve also got plenty of stories of people hearing his music or seeing him play and more or less saying, “Damn…” with all the praise that term of approbation suggests. 

His music has power, first of all, because his voice has such strength and character. Some people just seem like they have an extra larynx, thicker vocal chords, more vocal chords, or a peculiarly resonant jaw structure, and Jacob McCoy is one of them. It’s not polished like a Josh Groban or Pavarotti or something (which kind of music I don't listen to anyway). It’s like it’s made out of timber from bourbon barrels, a voice like Cash’s–raw but muscular and authentic. 

A voice like that can take you a long way, and without it, you might not be able to get anywhere. Even Joe Pug, who probably could've made it on the strength of his writing alone–who one of my students complained about sounding like Bob Dylan–has a unique and powerful voice. (My student was wrong for two reasons, by the way: 1) Pug’s voice is way more listenable than Dylan’s, and 2) Dylan is actually a great singer). McCoy could write songs and just sell them to other people (or however publishing deals work), but if you were making bets, you could have bet on him simply on the strength of his singing. But he’s also an incredible guitar player, with judgment about style that’s as good as his truly estimable chops. I guess that kind of taste is related to feel, which McCoy has it in abundance. On top of that, he’s more creative on his instrument than he needs to be, given everything else in his toolkit. Here’s proof: “Killing Me Softly.”

Subjectively, the times I’ve seen him live and all the hours I’ve logged listening to his catalog, would be enough proof for me to recommend to any label or venue that they sign him or book him. But I kind of forget how many easily demonstrable proofs there are of my judgment that McCoy is the real deal. For instance, he recorded his album Questions with Drew Holcomb’s band (the actual Neighbors, I guess). Listen to the instrumentation and musicianship on the album and try to tell me it wasn’t a good call for the band and the songwriter. 

One of those irrefutable subjective moments for me was the first time I listened to his LP Questions. I was driving west toward Tulsa on 412 and, in memory, it seems like there was a sunrise, but it had to’ve been evening, so I think there were some gnarly cloud formations in front of me getting lit up from a violent sunset behind me to the west, some spots of rain ahead. If I were trying to manipulate you, I wouldn’t have included the meteorological details. Probably, God was trying to manipulate me while I listened to the first song, which might be my favorite McCoy song, “Questions.” I was a sniveling mess by the end of the first chorus. Heaven forfend that I should be irreverent, but a critic of this artful moment could say that God had been a bit too baroque while McCoy’s song evinced the restraint and power I’ve attributed to its artist. 

While I’m grateful that McCoy, unlike the writer in Ramirez’s song, does have some well-produced and widely available work, it’s proof the world ain't fair that this songwriter in Arkansas hasn’t produced his second LP yet. I’ve heard enough of the stuff he’s written since then that I know I would pay a high price for the album and then wear any number of needles out spinning the vinyl. And I’m not the only one who feels that way. Some people I went to one of his concerts with begged me to try to get bootlegs of some of the originals he played. Since Jacob’s a world-class G, I’m pretty sure he obliged our request. 

The idea that “the best laugh never leaves your lungs” and that “best song never gets sung” really does haunt me. At the same time, I have a providential view of the universe, and I believe that God gifts people and gets glorified by those gifts whether or not they get rich and famous. Last I heard, McCoy is a music director at an Anglican church somewhere in Arkansas, and I’m not sure whether it would be idolatry or not to go to church just to hear him play hymns. He does play live gigs still, I believe, and it would be just as easy to idolize music there as at church. Either way, Jesus would forgive you, even if the addressee in one of McCoy’s best songs wouldn't.

One of the few surviving letters J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his friend C.S Lewis occurred on the occasion of some beef they had with each over critical comments Lewis made about some of Tolkien’s writing. The letter is infused with truth, humility, forgiveness, and the goal of reconciliation. At one point, Tolkien brings up the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and a penpal friend he made, Canon Dixon, and his account of a discussion the two had will forever be a comfort to me regarding the slings and arrows of an artist’s outrageous fortune:

H[opkins] seems clearly to have seen that 'recognition' with some understanding is in this world an essential part of authorship, and the want of it a suffering to be distinguished from (even when mixed with) mere desire for the pleasures of fame and praise. Dixon was rather bowled over by being appreciated by Hopkins; and much moved by Burne-Jones’ words (said to H. who quoted them) that ‘one works really for the one man who may rise to understand one’. But H. then demurred, perceiving that Burne-Jones’ hope can also in this world be frustrated, as easily as general fame: a painter (like Niggle) may work for what the burning of his picture, or an accident of death to the admirer, may wholly destroy. He summed up: The only just literary critic is Christ, who admires more than does any man the gifts He Himself has bestowed. Then let us ‘bekenne either other to Crist’. God keep you. p. 182-3

Probably, like Toklien’s suffering from a lack of recognition before the publication of The Lord of the Rings (even though he was already sort of famous for The Hobbit), this meditation on McCoy will look wonderfully ironic some day. But until the world better arranges itself in accordance with just deserts–and gives McCoy some windfalls commensurate to his work and talent–I take comfort in Scipture’s promise that “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” and the doctrinal likelihood that God truly uses even unwitnessed beauty to glorify himself and bless even the passing wind, much more then McCoy and the recognition he does get. 

Still, the world could use that second LP.

Ask him for his CD–he might laugh, but he’s not going to light a cigarette. He'll probably hand you a copy and tell you how much you can Venmo him.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “113: To C.S. Lewis” Sept. 1948. The Letters of J.R.R. 

Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien. New York: 

HarperColllinsPublishers, 2023. 182-83.