Singer's a prize Guy

He composes songs filled with an array of lovable rogues. You instantly love or loathe them - and that's the sign of a true craftsman.

Clark has produced an impressive collection of timeless gems. He has spent the last 30 years using everyday language to create memorable songs.

Born in Monahans, Texas, in 1941, Clark grew up in a home where the gift of a pocketknife was a rite of passage and poetry was read aloud. At 16 he moved to the Texas Gulf Coast, where he learned to play on a $12 Mexican guitar.

Moving to Houston, he began his career during the 'folk scare of the 60s, alongside Jerry Jeff Walker (whom he accompanied several years back on a tour which took in Matlock) and Townes Van Zandt.

Moving to San Francisco in the late 1960s, as social unrest was erupting, Clark worked briefly in a guitar shop, returned to Houston for a short time, and then moved to the LA, where he found work building guitars in the Dopyera Brothers' Dobro factory. He also signed a deal with RCA's Sunbury Music before pulling up stakes and relocating to Nashville in 1971.

The following year, country-folk singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker, released an album featuring the Clark composition LA Freeway, which became a radio hit.

A couple of years later Walker was back in the studios with another Clark soon-t-be-classic, Desperados Waiting for a Train. As much as any others, these two songs helped set the tone for the musical revolution of progressive country. By 1975, many of the revolutionaries would be defined as the Outlaws, happily rebelling against the rigidity of Nashville's men in suits.

In this alternative musical world of the late 1960s, inspired by the storytelling poems of Robert Frost and Stephen Vincent Benet, Clark began to write what he knew 'with a pencil and a big eraser'. LA Freeway, for example, maps his fish-out-of-water experience in LA. Desperados... is based on his memory of an oilfield worker who lived in his grandmother's hotel. Like almost all his songs, then and now, they are built from personal memory and experience.

Clark's move to Music City, where his pal Mickey Newbury lived, proved important. Clark and his wife Susanna would become the axis for groundbreaking singer-songwriters: Newbury, Van Zandt, Rodney Crowell, Billy Joe Shaver, Steve Earle, Dave Loggins and David Allen Coe.

In 1975, Clark made his recording debut with Old No l. During the next 20 years, he would record albums that were rich seams for other artists in search of new songs.

Johnny Cash was among the first to embrace Clark's music. His interpretation of Texas, 1947 was a chart hit, the first of several supplied by Clark.

To this day he continues to produce mesmerising albums of great craft and skill. You can catch him on a rare visit to these shores when he appears at the Memorial Hall, in Sheffield, next Tuesday (Sep 11). Tickets on 0114 2789 789.