Beschrijving
Coward Brothers (=Elvis Costello & T-Bone Burnett)
In an often-quoted line from the classic John Ford western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a reporter, confronted with evidence that contradicts the accepted story of a famous and respected man, says, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This same thought could apply to the Coward Brothers, who are either a pair of itinerant musicians with a remarkable if improbably colorful backstory, or two celebrated songwriters with an on-and-off collaboration spanning several decades. Either way, the Coward Brothers have issued a small but intriguing body of work that puts an unusual spin on the tropes of roots music, taking country and blues forms and bending them around smart, sometimes subversively witty lyrics on their first full-length album, 2024’s The Coward Brothers.
If you choose to believe their press release, Henry and Howard Coward may or may not be half-brothers whose career was launched by Smiley “Doc” Snipson, a one-time circus strongman and gambling addict with a history along the lower rungs of show business. In 1956, Snipson discovered Henry Coward performing at a nightspot in Fort Worth, Texas and was certain he had talent that could be profitably exploited. Signing Henry to a management deal, the young musician was given a gig playing in the backing band of another of Snipson’s charges during an extensive U.K. tour, where he encountered Howard Coward, who he believed was his long-lost half-brother, despite no hard evidence this was true. In 1957, Henry and Howard cut a rock & roll single for Justice Records, “My Baby Just Squeals (You Heel),” a small success that they followed with two very similar numbers, “My Baby Just Purrs (You’re Mine, Not Hers)” and the Cold War novelty number “My Baby Just Whistles (Here Come the Missiles).” As the Coward Brothers’ career was going into a slump, Snipson hit upon the idea of having the duo fake their own disappearance, letting the public believe they died in a plane wreck at sea while they hid out on a small Caribbean island, writing songs and sending tapes of their work to their publishers stateside. While the Coward Brothers imagined the scheme would end with them being “found” alive and well and returning to the loving embrace of their fans, in time they realized Snipson had been taking their songs, revising them slightly, and selling them to noted artists who passed them off as their own work. The Coward Brothers booked passage back to the United States but were unable to convince anyone the strange story of their disappearance and the theft of their intellectual property was true. Instead, they resigned themselves to a career writing novelty songs, and told anyone willing to listen about their sad fate.
While this makes for a good story, it is in fact just a story that was fabricated by Elvis Costello and T-Bone Burnett, who first met in 1984, when Burnett was booked to open for Costello on a solo acoustic tour of the United States. Costello and Burnett became fast friends, and they were soon playing the encores together, singing vintage country songs and dubbing themselves “the Coward Brothers.” Costello and Burnett cut a Coward Brothers single in 1985, the A-side an original titled “The People’s Limousine” and the flip a cover of Leon Payne’s “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me,” made famous by Hank Williams. Around this time, they began cooking up the Coward Brothers’ fictive backstory in interviews, while they developed a long-running collaborative relationship, first cemented when Burnett produced Costello’s acclaimed 1986 album King of America, and was later at the controls for 1989’s Spike, 2009’s Secret, Profane and Sugarcane, and 2010’s National Ransom. In 2024, Costello and Burnett decided to revive the Coward Brothers for a pair of projects. In collaboration with Christopher Guest, the actor, writer, and filmmaker who directed Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, the latter featuring a song score produced by Burnett. (Shearer is also known to music fans as Nigel Tufnel, lead guitarist with British metal legends Spinal Tap), they created an audio play in the form of a three-part podcast series that dramatized the life and times of the Coward Brothers, with contributions from actors Harry Shearer, Stephen Root, Edward Hibbert, and Rhea Seehorn. In tandem with the podcast, Costello and Burnett recorded an album, The Coward Brothers, that featured 20 songs written for the project; it was released by New West Records in November 2024.
(Mark Demming / Allmusic)
