“You can hear the whole world in certain voices”: The musicians that make Sam Elliott cry
With one of the most distinctive voices in all of cinema and the most recognisable moustache this side of Tom Selleck, it was inevitable that Sam Elliott would become a fixture of the western genre when he would hardly look out of place a couple of hundred years ago patrolling the dusty plains.
It’s not often any on-screen performer is so inextricably linked to a slab of facial furniture, but as everyone who watched his – and clean-shaven – recurring performance on Justified as unscrupulous crime boss Avery Markham in the show’s sixth season can attest, he looks downright weird without it.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter how good of an actor he was, because those sonorous tones alone would guarantee him a lifetime of voiceover work. Fortunately, Elliott also happens to be an immensely talented thespian, one who was destined to settle into the distinguished veteran role once his years had caught up with his voice.
He’s been gainfully employed since the late 1960s and remains a regular presence on-screen to this day, but despite being ripped straight from the Wild West and parachuted into the modern age, Elliott has never felt the need to follow the Clint Eastwood route and release an entire album full of country ditties to capitalise on his association with the genre.
That doesn’t mean he isn’t musically inclined, though, and there are even a couple of artists capable of reducing such a towering redwood of a man to a blubbering wreck. In an interview with AARP, he was careful to maintain his tough guy persona by prefacing his comment by saying, “I don’t often break down and boohoo,” although he did admit that he’s happy to “shed a tear at the drop of a hat”.
“Something will just move me, and my eyes will go misty,” he said. “A lot of times it’s music; Ray Charles, Johnny Cash. You can hear the world in certain voices.” He may not have a direct connection to Charles, but he does possess a bizarre tangential connection to the ‘Man in Black’, which obviously involves Tom Petty and the star of Kung Pow! Enter the Fist.
In the Steve Oedekerk-directed 2006 animation Barnyard, Elliott voices the tightly-wound cow Ben, who shows off his softer side by gently strumming Petty’s 1989 track ‘I Won’t Back Down’, which was covered by Cash on American III: Solitary Man. Whether that particular tune made him break down in tears remains up for debate, but it does at least provide a direct line between Elliott and Cash no matter how bananas it may be.
There’s no shame in being moved by music, with Elliott hardly being the first or last person to find themselves wiping away tears at a composition that delights the ears while leaving a lump in the throat, but he might be the only one with previous as a singing cow.
