The 1950s singer Tom Petty called the most incredible writer: “Simple”
Tom Petty didn’t consider himself a snob when it came to any kind of rock and roll music.
He only cared about what sounded good whenever he started playing, and as long as the song had a decent message and a catchy melody, that was more than enough for him to wrap his voice around it whenever he was working on any Heartbreakers tunes. But even for someone who had songs like ‘Free Fallin’ and ‘I Won’t Back Down’ under his belt, there were still more than a few musicians who knocked Petty on his ass when he looked at their body of work.
Then again, Petty didn’t concern himself with being one of the coolest artists in the world, either. The biggest genre out at the time of his rise to fame was punk rock, and he wasn’t about to put a safety pin through his nose and turn his guitars up as loud as possible for the hell of it. He studied under the greatest songwriters in rock history, and he was going to make the kinds of songs that he felt would make people like Roger McGuinn proud when he came out with ‘American Girl’.
A lot of his greatest work was indebted to the biggest names in old-school rock and roll, but rock was never that far away from its parent genres, either. Mojo was a classic case of Petty going way back to the blues whenever he strapped on his guitar, and while he did have his fair share of experimental moments when he worked with people like Jeff Lynne and Dave Stewart, he felt that he always felt at home playing country music.
But we have to specify what kind of country music we’re talking about. Petty wasn’t interested in playing the same tunes that Florida Georgia Line and Morgan Wallen would have been making in the 2010s, and the greatest moments that he ever had playing country came from him jamming with people like Johnny Cash. That would have been anyone else’s musical dream in Nashville, but Petty was even more interested in the days before Music Row became one of the biggest musical cities in the world.
The roots of all great country music descended from the biggest names in folk music, and you could hear Hank Williams trying his best to turn country into what it eventually became years down the line. Williams wasn’t afraid to talk about the troubles that he had in every one of his songs, and while some of his tracks may have been a little too taboo for the time, Petty was stunned that so many masterpieces could have come out of one person.
Williams was setting the template for everyone from Cash to Willie Nelson to Bob Dylan, and he felt that no one could touch the impressive run of songs he went on during his prime, saying, “It’s an incredible run of songs to put together that fast. He must have been writing all the time. They’re incredibly simple, there’s nothing flowery. It’s very direct. When he’s funny, he’s really funny, and when he wants to break your heart, he really can.” And you can hear a lot of Williams’s handiwork in Petty’s DNA whenever he busted out the acoustic guitars on any of his tracks.
He wore his country influence on his sleeve half the time, and even though he was willing to make an entire show of acoustic music when he played tracks like ‘Wildflowers’, it wasn’t out of the question for him to throw in a version of a song like ‘Lost Highway’ in the mix as well. The story in that song could have been any drifter that Petty came across when he started playing music, and when it comes to his style of music, Williams was about being more than just a casual influence.
Petty certainly wasn’t the first person to play what came to be called ‘heartland rock’, but the entire reason that the heartland exists comes from the way that Williams wrote about the breadbasket of America. He was the original rock and roll troubadour who happened to be playing country music, and Petty could understand every single word that he wrote whenever he inhabited those songs.
