About Jamie
“When my family moved to Montana we lived on a ranch 30 miles from the nearest town. It was a beautiful valley with rimrocks on one side and a mountain on the other. Mule tail deer, red fox and coyotes wandered by. Despite the natural beauty, it was pretty isolated. But we had all kinds of music in the house – Charlie Poole, the Beatles, Nick Drake, Johnny Cash. And I had a guitar that I could plink around on.”
- Jamie Granger
Brought up on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, and later in a tiny cowtown in western Montana, Granger began collecting words and pictures as a youngster. “I think storytelling is the one thing that runs through both of those places,” he says. “On the island, everybody had stories to tell. They would tell them, embellish them and change them around. So I was always impressed by that. And intrigued by that.
“And in Montana, we lived on a ranch, and it was pretty isolated, in the same way that we were isolated in Montserrat. I was 12, and my dad said ‘Do you want to be a cowboy, or do you want to go to school?’ I worked on the ranch for three months before this truant officer showed up. But while I was there, these guys - who were full of it - were always telling stories.”
Listeners will hear poetic footfalls from Granger’s home spots, and pit stops, in every groove of the album (“Barrel races and a clown in cleats, smiling through his broken teeth/My old man in his farmer’s tan/Runnin’ around playing kick-the-can,” from the song “My First Rodeo”). In “You and Me,” he poignantly recalls the exquisite blush of first love (“I love your hair/Your silhouette as you ascend the stairs/Your upper lip when you sip your cappuccino”).
Although he’d been writing poems and short stories since his youth, Jamie felt duty-bound to “get a real job,” and studied American and English literature at Florida State University, and earned his Master’s and PhD (feel free to call him Dr. Granger if you must).
He taught literature to college freshman, and to this day helms a course in business communication at Florida Atlantic University.
In the stay-at home stillness of the pandemic, with nowhere to go and nothing else to do, he worked tirelessly on his finger-picking and his lyrics, honing his skills until, when the time came to re-emerge from his cocoon, he was a fully-formed beautiful butterfly of a singer/songwriter.
He joined the Nashville Songwriters Association, where writers and music business professionals connect, via Zoom, and advise one another on song structure and the craft of creation. At open mic nights his confidence rose with every performance (and that’s where he met Shawde and Ward).
And the songs poured out: The epic almost-love stories “French Canadian Girl” and “Ilona,” the Renaissance art observational “Hands of Ladies,” the melancholy dream tale “Up to Heaven.”
“I’ve always been interested in storytelling through music,” Jamie Granger explains. “And I guess I finally said well, I have something to say, and I can say it better through music than I can in a poem or a short story.”
All the people, places and events in your life, it is said, become the DNA markers of your personality. A great storyteller can draw from this internal well at will, and turn memories and reflections – along with made-up stuff, too - into words and music that resonate with others.
On True Hearted Kind, his debut album for Y&T Music, singer/songwriter Jamie Granger follows in the vaunted footsteps of his folk music heroes with a set of winsome and winning tunes that tell stories with both warmth and humor, his words and melodies intertwined with intricately finger-picked acoustic guitar.
The songs recall John Prine, Leo Kottke, Nick Drake and early Bob Dylan, along with the 1920s string band Charlie Poole’s North Carolina Ramblers (a particular favorite from Jamie’s dad’s record collection).
Jack Shawde produced True Hearted Kind with Diane Ward. They illustrate the songs with the occasional wash of reverb Americana electric guitar, banjo or even minimalist violin accompaniment; Ward adds a harmony vocal here and there. Mostly, they chose to keep the focus squarely on Jamie’s worn-leather singing voice and acoustic guitar.
“Jamie,” Shawde believes, “has a unique knack for creating songs that describe honest human experiences. His lyrics create stories with lots of fascinating lyrical ‘furniture’ that portray characters that grab your imagination, often laced with humor and self-deprecation.
“For us, bringing Jamie’s vision of his songs to life was a rare opportunity.”
![True Hearted Kind [Digipak w/Booklet]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a1488eda79976e1937fc1e/2de4b3bd-023a-4d12-b467-038d1d6a44e9/Jamie+Granger+True+Hearted+Kind+x2+1600x1600.jpg)
