Texas roots rock/Americana group Jamestown Revival co-wrote the score to the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical The Outsiders, a late-‘60s period piece about class friction and teen warfare after an accidental death during a bullying assault. Like the group’s own music, the show incorporates a lot of different influences into its whole, including folk, country, and rock. The show was inspired by the S.E. Hinton novel of the same name.
Another author also inspired the core Jamestown songwriting team of Zachary Chance and Jonathan Clay. That figure is the late Louis L’Amour, the highly prolific Western novelist and short-story writer whose American frontier stories were immensely popular and remain perpetually in print all these decades later. He wrote more than 100 novels and 250 short stories and inspired numerous film and TV adaptations of his works, including the 1953 3D Western movie Hondo starring John Wayne and Geraldine Page. There are reportedly over 300 million copies of L’Amour’s books in print.
A Connection Across Generations
What’s interesting is how the thirtysomething Jamestown Revival got into L’Amour’s books, especially since he passed away in 1988.
“My grandpa used to read them,” Chance tells American Songwriter about the author’s books. “He always had them sitting next to his little La-Z-Boy recliner, so I’d thumb through ‘em when I was a kid. But I never really thought much of it. Then as John and I got older and we were touring and sleeping in our cars and sleeping at truck stops, we just started buying them off the little rack at the truck stop and reading them in the back of the car.”
The duo eventually got hooked on L’Amour’s short stories, and that is a big reason why they named their 2016 album The Education of a Wandering Man, the title for which was taken from the author’s autobiography. Prior to that, the song “Wandering Man” (inspired by L’Amour) emerged on their debut album Utah.
In his memoir, L’Amour is “just telling stories about all the books he used to read and his travels,” Clay says. “He used to work in rail yards, all this stuff. It’s a really cool autobiography.”
Twists and Turns
Clay adds what he found transfixing about L’Amour’s Western tales was how their combination of key elements clicked. “What’s so cool is his character development, and there’s always a twist at the end,” Clay notes. “Sometimes you kind of see it coming, but so many times I’m like, ‘Whoa. That’s crazy.’ He’s master of a short story. It’s 10 pages, and he develops a handful of characters, then surprises you at the end. It’s really cool.”
After they did their 2016 album, Jamestown Revival wrote and recorded an EP collection fully devoted to L’Amour. Released in 2021, Fireside with Louis L’Amour: A Collection of Songs Inspired by Tales from the American West featured six songs all inspired by the first collection of L’Amour short stories called The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour The Frontier Stories – Volume I. The songs go in chronological order related to the stories. The group might do a second EP at some point with the same concept.
The first song on Jamestown’s Fireside EP is “Bound for El Paso” which was inspired by “The Gift of Cochise,” the short story that inspired Hondo (which later led to a short-lived television series in 1967).
When asked if they thought they might have turned some Jamestown listeners into L’Amour readers, Clay replies, “I would sure hope so. We got to go to his ranch in Durango [Colorado] and meet his son Bo and hang out with him and sit at Louis’ desk and play a song in his barn. It was really special, and Bo has kept in touch. Even Louis L’Amour’s wife sends us Christmas cards. They’re really sweet people.”
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