Susanna Clark

Posted 2-23-22 Revisiting With Tamara Saviano, Author of ‘Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark’. The desire to connect with the essence, life history, and contributions of Guy Clark continues to intensify since his passing on May 17, 2016. Guy Clark was the hub of a world of artistic activity for some of America’s most revered and substantive songwriters and performers. For them and many of his other fans, he set an elevated standard of what uncompromising artistic expression is all about. Tamara Saviano’s book Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark is essential reading—for those seeking to further their knowledge and understanding of Guy and his life’s work.

When director Tamara Saviano decided to make a film about the Americana songwriter Guy Clark, she knew she couldn’t tell his story without covering the lives of two other creative souls – his wife, the songwriter and painter Susanna Clark, and his best friend, the fellow Americana star, Townes Van Zandt. “They influenced him so much, and he influenced them too,” said Saviano to the Guardian. “You can’t separate them.”

Guy Clark always thought he was a folksinger, but as a performer with an acoustic guitar and a Texas accent, country music was the magnetic pole he couldn’t escape. Considered a maverick in Nashville, he became part of the ‘70s “outlaw country” gang that traded rhinestone suits and glossy production for thoughtful songwriting and homespun recordings. By the ‘90s Clark was a leading light in Americana, a loose-shoed genre that encompassed root, branch and twang.

Many of country music’s stories have been told time and again, to the point at which they’re enshrined like tall tales in pop history. But it’s a form that is so often rooted in narrative and storytelling, and there are a thousand more histories of country music that can’t be squeezed into one Ken Burns documentary, no matter how long. Aside from the stable of usual famous names like Dolly Parton and Patsy Cline, the role of women in country music in general is underrecognized, overlooked and ignored, but especially when it comes to the outlaw era. It’s often forgotten that, alongside Waylon and Willie, Jessi Colter was included on the famous RCA compilation Wanted! The Outlaws, which capitalized on country music’s rugged and raw new movement and turned it into a brand name, becoming the very first platinum-certified country album.

“I’ve got a woman I love, she’s crazy and paints like God. She’s got a playground sense of justice, she don’t take odds. I got a tattoo with her name right through my soul. And I think everything she touches turns to gold.”. Guy Clark, “Stuff That Works”. Susanna Talley...

“I wish I was in Austin, at the Chili Parlor Bar/ Drinkin’ mad dog margaritas and not carin’ where you are.”. That’s the opening line of “Dublin Blues,” a song written by the late, great native Texan songwriter Guy Clark. It’s also exactly where Tamara Saviano was, during South by Southwest in 2008, when she began an epic journey of documenting Clark’s life.

The documentary movie, Without Getting Killed or Caught, is as much about Susanna Clark as it is about her husband Guy. Which makes sense, because you can’t tell the story of one without the other. This may mystify those who know only of Guy, the tall, square-jawed Texan who wrote...