Rodney Crowell to perform in Rocky Mount

The song is called “The Long Journey Home,” and it opens with scenes from Montana, where Bullington for years worked as a doctor and where he spent much of his free time writing some really intriguing folk music.

“We ran off chasing rainbows beneath the blue Montana sky/And we self-proclaimed our freedom with a roar/We crossed those raging rivers and we drank the taverns dry/And we bowed our heads to legends gone before/Are you ready for the long journey home?”

Crowell, who performs on Tuesday at Harvester Performance Center in Rocky Mount, dedicated that number to Bullington, who died at 58 in November after suffering from pancreatic center. Bullington, whose family moved to Roanoke when he was a toddler, graduated from North Cross School.

The two met late in Bullington’s life, through Crowell’s longtime friend (and social media manager) Joanne Gardner. She had moved to Livingston, Mont., to escape the relative stresses of Nashville. Out West, she heard and met Bullington, became his manager and introduced him to Crowell.

“Over time, I got to know Ben a bit, and then started to understand his writing and really came to receive Ben as a poet, a true poet,” Crowell said. “I said, ‘You want to come to Nashville and record? Come stay at my house and use my studio if you want to.’

“He used another studio, but he would come stay with us and we would have conversations at night when he would get home, about the work. And I would listen to it and throw in a suggestion here and there.”

During the course of Bullington’s last three albums, Crowell added a couple of performances and liner notes. Those discs included Bullington’s self-titled final record, which Crowell called the best of Bullington’s career.

It’s high praise from one of the best in American songwriting.

Crowell, 63, has been writing hit songs for himself and others since the 1970s, when he moved from Texas to Nashville. Such numbers as “Till I Gain Control Again” (Emmylou Harris), “Leavin’ Louisiana in the Broad Daylight” (Oak Ridge Boys) and “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” (Waylon Jennings) preceded a solo career that included a string of five No. 1 country hits from the 1988 album “Diamonds & Dirt.”

Among the chart-toppers from the ’88 disc was “It’s A Small World,” a duet with Rosanne Cash, to whom he was married.

His multiple Grammy Awards include one for Best Country Song (“After All This Time,” 1990) and Best Americana Album (“Old Yellow Moon,” which he won this year in a collaboration with Harris).

Crowell recently reconvened most of the musicians — guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Steuart Smith, bassist Michael Rhodes and drummer Eddie Bayers — who helped him record “Diamonds & Dirt” for the sessions that would result in “Tarpaper Sky.” The only player missing from the “Diamonds” sessions was the late Barry Beckett.

“I wanted to get those guys together because we always had a real easy creative flow,” Crowell said. “I didn’t want to get together in order to reproduce ‘Diamonds & Dirt.’ That’s not in my thought pattern at all. But I wanted to experiment with what we could do now.

“So we just unplugged the headphones and threw them out of the studio and recorded everything live, including a good bit of the background vocals. … So the record is not really a produced record. It’s a performance of 11 songs. And I had a great time, you know.

“The first day was really difficult, because those guys play on a thousand [conventional] recordings a year. But on the second day, everybody had it and understood how to do what needed to be done, and voila, it’s 1959 again. And that was what I really fed off, and so did the musicians.”

Smith and a group of younger, up-and-coming players will back Crowell, and opening act Shannon McNally will join them for a few songs, Crowell said.

At some point before the show, he and his other Roanoke connection, longtime national political strategist Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, will meet up for dinner.

“He’s a great source of humor, Mudcat,” Crowell said. “He’s my pipeline into politics. I tell him I refuse to watch television or news. I hate the divided debate, and don’t want to be any part of it, but I will from time to time get the lowdown from Mudcat, because it’s so funny. Actually, he should have his own show.”

Saunders said that the two met in 2004, through revered Nashville session pianist John Hobbs.

“From the time Rodney and I met, we’ve been close friends ever since,” Saunders said. The Back Creek resident has grown close to Crowell’s wife and children, too.

He has seen and heard Crowell perform often, including the time he invited Crowell to sing his song, “Please Remember Me,” for then-Sen. Jim Webb and several of Webb’s buddies from the Vietnam War the night before Webb’s 2007 swearing-in.

To Saunders, Crowell writes and performs better than ever.

“Rodney and I were talking about it not long ago, and we were talking about it in the sense like Satchel Paige said: You don’t get old and retire; you retire and then you get old,” Saunders said. “Both of us have the attitude that we’re better than we ever were. Why slow down?

“And I believe that about Rodney. I think he’s better than he’s ever been … and the stuff he’s writing now is incredible. Everything he writes is impressive. He’s going to keep putting it out. He’s not going to stop.”

Crowell certainly shows no signs of slowing down. By the time he released “Tarpaper Sky,” he had published a memoir, “Chinaberry Sidewalks”; had released the album “Kin,” a collaboration with poet Mary Karr; then the Grammy-winning collaboration with Harris.

“I guess it’s a love of the work, because I certainly do love the work,” Crowell said. “I’m not comparing myself to [Pablo] Picasso or an artist of that category, but what I do know about a [Vladamir] Nabokov or a Picasso is that they get up and go to work every day.

“So I feel it’s my blessing that I can get up and make a pot of tea and then get to work writing, making things up, making songs. I mean, it’s really a good job, you know.”