“He’s the granddaddy”: The American icon Tom Petty said invented his songwriting
Tom Petty didn’t ever want to question the magic behind his songwriting.
Any other songwriter would try their best to show their process and how they come up with some of the greatest melodies anyone has ever heard, but Petty felt that the right song only came at the right time when he was sitting down with a guitar, and inspiration struck him. That kind of stream of consciousness was how all great songs came to pass, but he did have pieces of musical history guiding him towards certain sounds when he first got started.
Then again, it’s not hard to see Petty wearing his influences on his sleeve throughout every album he ever made. As much as he got roped into the punk movement when it got started around the time of his debut record, he was into making old-school rock and roll the same way that his idols did. A lot of those early records have Byrds influences dripping out of every single instrument, but it would be hard to look at any Heartbreakers tune without bringing up the British invasion.
Petty was transfixed when he saw The Beatles and The Rolling Stones for the first time, and while Elvis Presley was doing something that seemed unattainable to him, the thought of a bunch of guys getting up onstage and having fun was just what he needed when he started putting together his band. He wanted to play songs that gave him that same adrenaline rush, but when he fell back down to Earth, there was a lot more to be found in the world of country music.
And let’s be clear: we’re not talking about the modern version of what country music is. The heartland rocker didn’t have time to focus on what the arena-rock brand of country music was supposed to sound like, but when he started making records with people like Johnny Cash, he took to it like a fish in water. He was a student of all those great country records that came out around the same time as early rock and roll, and it didn’t get much purer than Hank Williams.
While Bob Dylan is the almighty songwriter in most rock stars’ minds, there was a simplicity to what Williams did that you can hear spilling out of a lot of Petty’s later work. His final albums with the Heartbreakers tended to be a bit more bluesy, but whenever he brought out the acoustic guitars, hearing him talk about the simple pleasures of life wasn’t all that different from Williams’s approach when he first started woodshedding his first songs.
So for Petty, Williams ranked slightly above Dylan in his mind, saying, “Bob and I have talked a lot about Hank. He’s a big fan. We’ve played Hank’s songs in rehearsals many times. That mix of mystery and simplicity is very Dylan but, really, you can’t be a songwriter and not appreciate Hank Williams. He’s the granddaddy of all that.” And every now and again, Petty could have put that lip service to use when jamming with the rest of the Heartbreakers in between soundchecks.
Pack up the Plantation already had a token country song ‘The Stories We Could Tell’ at the end of the record, but even in Runnin’ Down a Dream, Petty sounds right at home when he starts strumming away on a song like ‘Lost Highway’. His voice had matured a lot more since the days of ‘Refugee’, and hearing him talk about passing down wisdom like Williams did feels so natural coming out of his mouth.
There may have been songwriters before Williams and there were a million more after him, but the one thing that Petty took from him more than anything was the heart behind all of his tunes, You could hear the person underneath it all whenever he played, and Petty tried his best to emulate that kind of natural charisma as best he could whenever working on his greatest hits.
