I came from the north part of Illinois at just about the exact midpoint between Chicago and the Mississippi River. They call this the Corn Belt. There…it is all about planting corn at the right time….catching enough rainfall….getting it to be “knee-high by the Fourth of July”…. de-tasseling it….picking it….shucking it….getting it off to the green giant…cutting the stalks down to make silage for your cows….and then getting the ground ready for winter. I could eat corn every day. I swelled up with secret pride one day in new york city when a friend of mine called me a CornFlower. But long before that…when I was ten years old….my Dad gave me a .22 rifle and later a 12 gauge shotgun. While I had some good days and good seasons traipsing up and down the fencelines of boone county…there was an inner voice that kept whispering…asking…what was I really doing? A good day for me might be a very bad day for some hapless little creature. by and by i began to notice a mounting element that would eventually take my senses to a most holy level. I’m talking about the mystical freight trains that moved through town coming and going between the City and the River. Especially in the dead of night. Their whistles blew my mind and my soul too. Underneath those blue chords ran the rhythm of the wheels hitting the gaps between the rail sections. The engineers would slow the trains down as they crawled through town and the slower they went….the deeper the rhythm. The lanterns swung and the signal bells rang out at intersections as the drivers leaned on the whistles…and the world seemed to triple in size. All this music clicked into place for me one summer night when I heard the guitar instrumental…Apache…on my transistor radio. in a single instant…the pull of those locomotives coupled to the sound of this guitar opened up a place where the target was different. You could now aim an instrument toward the treasure chest unlocked by a train. Then came the part where you might direct that aim toward telling your story in a song. To this day….no matter what music I hear and to what degree it might carry me off….nothing thrills me like the sound of a slow moving train easing through a small town. It conjures a world of wonder and penetrates everything it touches. Including me.
On the other hand I saw early on that a story could be told in a picture….and I’ve longed to do that always. Watercolor painting has been a fine way for me to work at this. I thank the Lord for giving us eyes to see color. and I thank you for looking and listening. I hope you find something here that feels good.
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Rowland Salley is a bass-player. He writes songs and also paints pictures. As a bass player, he has played or recorded with Bobby Gentry, the Traum Brothers, Ian and Sylvia, Joan Baez, John Prine, Shawn Colvin, Lucinda Williams, Maria Muldaur and others. He has been bassist with Chris Isaak & Silvertone since 1985. His songs have been recorded by various artists. His song "Killing the Blues" has been recorded by John Prine (Pink Cadillac and Anthology), and by Shawn Colvin (Cover Girl). Another cover of the song appears on the October, 2007 Rounder duet release, "Raising Sand", by Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin, and Alison Krauss of Union Station. Their version of the song won a Grammy that year. This song also appears on Salley's solo record "Killing the Blues". His watercolor paintings have been displayed in the San Francisco Presidio, San Francisco, and at the Putney School in Vermont.
