Jim Lauderdale Artistfacts

April 11, 1957
Born in Trautman, North Carolina, Jim Lauderdale is an Americana and bluegrass musician with more than 30 albums in his catalog, beginning with 1991's Planet Of Love, but he's better known as a songwriter and guest performer for other artists. Ironically, it was the song that took the least amount of effort that brought him his first big success when Mark Chestnutt took "Gonna Get A Life," co-written by Frank Dycus, to the top of the Country chart in 1995.

"We wrote it really quickly, so sometimes it's funny, the songs that you really labor over might not get cut, and then the ones that you put a lot of effort into and feel a certainty about turn out not to be that way, so you just never know," he explained in a 2010 Songfacts interview.
As Lauderdale's reputation began to grow as a songwriter's songwriter, with a who's who of artists covering his songs - including George Strait, Patty Loveless, Gary Allan, and Vince Gill - he got the opportunity to not only meet, but also work with his childhood musical heroes. His early interest in bluegrass music was influenced by Dr. Ralph Stanley, one of the forerunners of the genre. Lauderdale wrote and produced two albums for Stanley, I Feel Like Singing Today (1999) and Lost In The Lonesome Pines (2002). The latter was name Best Bluegrass Album at the 2003 Grammy Awards.
Lauderdale also spent part of his youth covering Grateful Dead songs in a band with his best friend, never imagining he'd someday team up with Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Their longtime partnership produced more than 100 songs, starting with "Joy, Joy, Joy," a tune they wrote for Stanley's I Feel Like Singing Today. They continued to work together on a string of Lauderdale's own releases, beginning with 2004's Headed For The Hills. One of their last collaborations, the ballad "Memory," was recorded shortly before Hunter's death in 2019 and was included on Lauderdale's 2021 album, Hope.
Lauderdale told American Songwriter's Off The Record podcast that he first met Robert Hunter through a mutual friend in 1997, but they had to work around Lauderdale's lack of technological prowess to knock out their first song. "I still didn't know how to email people," he admitted in the 2021 interview. Instead, Hunter faxed him the lyrics and Lauderdale wrote the melody.
Elvis Costello invited Lauderdale to sing harmonies on his 2009 album, Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, which led to a lengthy European tour together in support of the release. They also wrote a couple songs together, with "I Lost You" ending up on Costello's next album, National Ransom (2010).
Lauderdale's career inspired the 2013 documentary, Jim Lauderdale: The King Of Broken Hearts. The title comes from his song "The King of Broken Hearts," which was made famous by George Strait on the 1992 Pure Country soundtrack.
Lauderdale has often been written about as an example of the country music industry's failure to promote talented under-the-radar artists in favor of keeping the spotlight on their superstar acts. Country singer-songwriter Kim Richey, who followed a similar trajectory writing hits for the likes of Trisha Yearwood and Brooks & Dunn without getting her proper due as an artist in her own right, inadvertently coined the phrase "The Jim Lauderdale Phenomenon" to explain the injustice. In a 2000 interview with The Tennessean, she noted how Lauderdale was dropped from his record deal just after earning a Grammy nomination for his first album with Ralph Stanley.

"I'm baffled by the Jim Lauderdale phenomenon," she noted. "He's one of the best singers in town, and I would have bet good money on him."
In 2013, Lauderdale and another of his frequent songwriting partners, Buddy Miller - they co-wrote The Chicks cut "Hole In My Head" from the smash 1999 album, Fly - collaborated on the album Buddy And Jim. In 2018, they launched The Buddy & Jim Show on SiriusXM's Outlaw Country, where they've welcomed veteran country performers like Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, and Tim O'Brien.
Lauderdale is a dedicated practitioner of Tai chi, a style of Chinese martial arts that he included in the music video for his 2019 song "Listen." He kept up the practice through Zoom classes during the COVID-19 lockdown around the time he recorded his Hope album.

"It's really calmed me down, and helps in the day to day anxieties and pressures of life," he told Paste Magazine in 2021. "It's not a cure-all by any means of everything physical and mental, but it really resonates with me."
In 2018, Lauderdale released Jim Lauderdale And Roland White, a once-lost album that was nearly 40 years old. Lauderdale initially dreamed of becoming a bluegrass banjo artist and when he first came to Nashville as a 22-year-old hopeful, he found a mentor in famed bluegrass mandolinist Roland White. In the summer of 1979, the pair recorded an album in Earl Scruggs' basement and tried to pitch it around town, but no record labels were interested. By the time Lauderdale started making his own records, the masters for his collaboration with White were lost - until White's wife found the tape buried at the bottom of a box decades later.

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