Cover Story: Elle King
Elle King (photo: Corey Bost)
If you’re craving some homespun wisdom in these complicated, hi-tech times, you need look no further than old episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, a popular CBS TV series that ran from 1962 to 1971 (and 1993 film) and applied old-saw simplicity to complicated modern society. For any Gen X-, Y- or Z-er who might have missed it, the sitcom’s fish-out-of-water premise was simple — Ozark patriarch Jed Clampett and his kin, after stumbling across oil on his property, moves into a palatial Southern California mansion Jed and spends almost every episode unraveling the schemes of his avaricious banker Milburn Drysdale, who oversees the clan’s $96 million (equivalent to over $710 million today. The family is charmingly devoid of any pretension: To them, the pool is a “Cement pond,” the billiards room features ‘Fancy dining table with pot servers (cue sticks),” and Jed’s casual aphorisms are often many directed at L’il Abner-dense nephew Jethro Bodine, like “If that boy had lard for brains, he could not grease too many skillets.” But the true heart and moral center of the series was always his blonde bombshell daughter Elly May Clampett, as played by a deadpan-droll Donna Douglas, who was always unaware of her own beauty and preferred moccasins and rope-belted dungarees to ‘60s Hollywood fashions like high heels and miniskirts, and would rather hang out with Duke the bloodhound and her cavalcade of beloved pet “critters” than go on a Mystery Date with some shallow Tinseltown creep — many of whom were keenly interested in her family fortune.
Viewers couldn’t help rooting for this wide-eyed naif, even though her cooking was truly atrocious. And Elly May still strikes a resonant chord with Grammy-nominated blues-rock belter Elle King, whose 14-year career has followed a similar, if slightly more serpentine path. When she last checked in, early in the pandemic, she was bunking with her sister and her children in Los Angeles and had become “a true Hollywood Hillbilly” with access to her own high-falutin’ cement pond, even an inflatable hot tub; she joked at the time while promoting her then-current, gently acoustic In Isolation EP, which a displayed a hushed, thoughtful new songwriting side of her, inspired by the pandemic. “But that was like an eternity ago,” the singer now sighs, on the eve of her latest full-length release, “Come Get Your Wife,” which is straightforward country, was composed and recorded in her comfortable new hometown of Nashville, and features cameos from genre artists Dierks Bentley, Ashley McBryde, Miranda Lambert, and some of the best co-writers and session players Music Row has to offer. The swimmin’ pools and movie stars celebrated in “The Beverly Hillbillies” theme song? Pshaw, King spits — she’s had enough, and she’s returned to the familiar backwoods territory that was her home turf all along.
This remarkable stylistic U-turn might appear shocking to fans of King’s rollicking signature hits like “Ex’s and Oh’s,” “America’s Sweetheart,” and “Playing For Keeps.” But for anyone paying closer attention, she says, she’s left a trail of breadcrumbs that even the most bumbling Hansel and Gretel could find, all leading up to 2016’s smash hit single “Different For Girls,” wherein she first teamed up with Bentley —now one of her best friends — which won them both a CMA Award for Musical Event of the Year. King grew up cursing like a sailor and living in just as many exotic ports of call, from her birthplace in Los Angeles — to model London King and “Saturday Night Live”-renowned Adam Sandler alum Rob Schneider — to New York, Copenhagen, and Philadelphia, where she attended its University of the Arts. But for her most formative teen years, she resided with her mom and music-loving stepdad on a farm in rural Ohio, affectionately known to locals as being part of the Tri-State Area, with Indiana and Kentucky (full disclosure: This writer was a part of it, too, hailing from Indianapolis). And that made all the difference.
“And it’s funny because I’ve always alluded to my childhood in Ohio, but I’ve always been really protective over it because my family still lives that, and that’s the truest part of my identity and my family,” says King, who swears her songwriting quietly changed when she discovered the sonic properties of the banjo. “So it’s interesting now to reflect on that because country music has definitely been a massive part of my whole entire career. I got signed because of a country song, and on every record I’ve ever put out, there’s been a country song. And I wrote “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home)” (her recent C&W hit with Miranda Lambert, included on “Come Get Your Wife”) when I was 24, and it didn’t make the record (her 2015 debut Love Stuff). And now that song alone has taught me to get out of the way, let things have their own life, let things have their own time, and that’s been a massive teaching tool for me. And now that I’m in the country, I’ve realized that it’s given me the freedom to be my truest, most authentic self. They let me drink, they listen to my ideas and what I have to say, and it’s changed my life my family’s life, and all my bandmates have moved to Nashville now, and it’s become the start of a really beautiful chapter of my life.” Thinking about the transformation for a minute, she adds, “It’s definitely the polar opposite of where I was the last time we talked.”
It wasn’t a straight reverse-Clampett trajectory from L.A. to Nashville; you would imagine, either. But nothing in King’s topsy-turvy life has ever gone according to a carefully mapped-out plan. For example, she met a man she thought was her soulmate, Andrew Ferguson, in London in January of 2016, got engaged 12 days later in San Francisco, married the following Valentine’s Day, but then divorced just as hastily a year later. Prior to lockdown, King had begun dating Dan Tooker, an East Coast tattoo artist, and in that last “In isolation” chat, she was proud for having maintained a long-distance relationship for two long years and then nurturing it through the coronavirus era. The couple didn’t prevail upon her sister for too long — they soon moved to Santa Fe, where she got pregnant but where family houses were simply out of their price range. So they instead decamped to a more affordable farm in Rhode Island, from which Tooker could easily commute to the Cambridge parlor he owns, Riverside. “I call him my Dragon because he’s done a bunch of dragons on me,” explains ink enthusiast King, who met him when she visited his shop in 2018 just to check out its go-to designs. “I wandered in, and he was like, ‘Who. Are. You?’ And we’ve been together ever since.” On September 1, 2021, they welcomed their first child into the world, a boy named Lucky, who’s already showing an unusual propensity for percussion. “I really think he’s gonna be a drummer,” says mom proudly.
Elly May had simple standards for potential suitors. “I sure don’t wanna marry up with any man I can whup,” she once declared, which was saying a lot, given that she regularly beat the bejeezus out of her hulking dimwit cousin Jethro, played by Max Baer, Jr., son of renowned boxer Max Baer. It takes a bit more for a beau to keep up with King, and she’s been upfront about her faux-pas frailties from the start, as listed in the arena-chiming anthem “America’s Sweetheart”: “I think I’m pretty with these old boots on/ I think it’s funny when I drink too much/ Hey, you try to change me? You can go to hell,” she snarled defiantly in the track’s verses, and shrugged her way through the singalong chorus of “What do you want from me?/ I’m not America’s sweetheart.” Tooker apparently can keep up, and the couple shares a love of critters, so their retreats in Rhode Island and now Nashville boasts a menagerie of goats, donkeys, and other assorted farm animals. And not only are they still together after several long-distance years, “We made a human, and Dan is the most incredible father, and I feel proud just to give that to my son, like, ‘Mama’s done good! I picked me a good ’un!’” chortles King in the same down-home vernacular in which she’s always sung. It’s just that now the fiddle, pedal steel, and banjo backdrops for her words are more complementary and age-and-experience-appropriate.
In one pedal-steel-powered “Wife” stomper, “Before You Met Me,” King breathes a long sigh of lyrical relief for her future hubby. “I was a train wreck, hot mess/ Too many cigarettes…I was a weeknight drinker/ Karaoke singer…the way I used to be/ I can guarantee/ Two weeks in, you would’ve left me.” The cut wasn’t penned by King specifically, and nor was her Dierks Bentley duet “Worth a Shot,” originally an outtake from his last solo album, which blithely takes country’s traditional tear-in-your-beer-isms to a whole new level. But even when a song wasn’t composed by her, they are still covered with her improvisational fingerprints and fit perfectly with her new roots-honoring mentality. “And you know what’s great about Nashville?” She asks rhetorically. “All the great songwriters live there, and they’re always up for it, and saying, ‘You guys need a song? Hey — let me pitch!”
For instance, the bluesy submission “Out Yonder,” about Gladys Kravitz gossip in a too-small town, so impressed King she tracked down its prodigious composer and wound up writing a good portion of the album with her and her own go-to team of Bobby Hamrick and Matt McKinney. “She’s a 22-year-old girl named Ella Langley, and she is a fucking superstar,” declares King, no slouch herself. “And I feel honored that she gave me all this because she gave me some badass ideas. But those three helped me write these songs that I am just so, so proud of. I mean, they helped me write a song about my son! They helped me write a song about where I’m from in Ohio! And with this whole album, whether I wrote the song or not, I changed things (lyrically) to make everything me — it had to be genuine to me. And also, country music has really helped me to let down my guard — I no longer have to prove anything, I can get out of my own way, and I don’t have to be in control. Because a good song is a good song.” It’s the old Prayer of Serenity in a Nashville nutshell. All she has artistic power over is the album artwork, the storyboarding of her music videos, how good the song sounds once it’s recorded, then how accurately it can be replicated live. She now has the wisdom to know the difference, she allows it. “And I just feel so…so excited! Country music is a beautiful, beautiful thing.” Her and the genre, you might say, utilizing a classic Jed Clampetism, are closer than two burrs in a mule’s tail.” And whereas back in Hollywood, where she also pursued acting for a spell, she often felt “Lower than a hog’s chin on market day,” now King is “Happy as a gopher in soft dirt.” And that, indeed, is pretty damned happy.
First and foremost, there was always that Voice. An instrument fairly unparalleled on today’s charts, and a hurricane-velocity mashup of Loretta Lynn twang, Edith Piaf sharpness, Eartha Kitt exotica, Wanda Jackson’s hiccup/snarl, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe earthiness.” I’ve never allowed a genre to define me, and I’ve always made a joke about it, like; You couldn’t fit my ass in a box if you tried,’” says the singer, self-deprecating to a fault. “But now I feel happy saying that country is my home because, as a genre, it is where I feel the best, you know?” She still remembers the day back in Ohio when her stepfather first played AC/DC’s stunning “Back in Black” comeback for her. Her jaw hit the floor, the musical gears inside her shifted into a new powerchord overdrive, and she wound up getting the Australian outfit’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” title tattooed across her bicep. But he didn’t stop there — he continued her musical education and taught her that the “Sun Sessions”-era was equally as crucial as Angus Young, as were other disparate full-length classics filed under punk, rockabilly rhythm and blues, even disco and Top 40 pop. In fact, King is equally thrilled by the recent HBO Bee-Gees documentary as she is by the news that, thanks to the unexpected placement of their four-decade-old chest “The Goo Goo Muck” in Netflix’s Addams Family spinoff Wednesday, the voodoo rockabilly cult combo The Cramps is suddenly on the Google-search radar again. Add all of these influences up, she adds, including the rafter-rattling gospel she delves into on “Try Jesus,” and Voila! “That’s what country is to me,” she sighs contentedly. “ And all of these things have helped me make this country record that I am so proud of, and it’s just unabashedly, absolutely me. Country has breathed a whole new life into me.”
Of course, King couldn’t move forward without looking back. “Come Get Your Wife” with the banjo-based childhood reminiscence, “Ohio”; co-penned by the King/Hamrick/Langley/McKinney team; it finds the artist whimsically reflecting on Jackson, Ohio, which “may not be like Hollywood/ But we got nice hills and hey roll real good…All I need on a Friday night/ Is some Coors in the cooler and a few fireflies/ And a good ole-fashioned mountain dancing song.” It’s all about reclamation, even when the vintage Thomas Mann axion posits that You can never go home again. The music industry in Los Angeles had to urbanize her rural tendencies, she recalls, even when America’s Sweetheart had revolved around her favorite instrument, the banjo. The album title itself was inspired by a real-life incident that revealed the sexism still lurking just beneath the surface of society, post#metoo movement. “I admit that I run my mouth, especially when I’m drinking,” she harrumphs. In the group she was with, she made a joke that everybody else was making, she adds, which apparently displeased a male member of the entourage, who addressed King’s significant other instead of her. “He actually shouted over me, and I have never had anybody shout over me like that, yelling, ‘Dude! Come get your wife!’ And I was like, ‘Ooh! Damn! I’m gonna call my record that!’ But yeah, it actually happened. That whole ‘Uh, the men are talking now shit is still fucking out there.
Don’t kid yourself that everyone in Music Row has fallen under King’s charming “Beverly Hillbillies” spell. Some still focus on that chipped front tooth, those dusty old cowboy boots, and a slew of tattoos worthy of Bradbury’s “Illustrated Man,” and winning them over hasn’t been easy. Now that she’s become a regular at Country Awards shows, where she recently performed Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire,” backed by The Black Keys, while her piano was actually set on fire (“I had a lot of pressure there and it was really nerve-wracking because your body produces so much adrenaline and cortisol that it takes days for your system to come down from that,” says the artists who rose to the occasion but slipped later on her home stairs while delivering a bottle of milk to Lucky and knocked herself unconscious; she’s still being treated for a subsequent concussion). But it was worth it, she adds — her stepdad had the keyboard-pounding Lewis on heavy rotation around the house when she was a kid, and she had to pay her respects to the late legend.
King was even fortunate enough to meet country queen Loretta Lynn at a similar ceremony before she passed last year. “It was very brief, and it was my first time at the CMA’s,” she recalls. “I walked by her, and she was sitting with someone, and it was just one of those things — I just had to say, ‘I love you so much! Thank you for your music! Thank you so much!’ And somebody basically shot me a dirty look, like I’d interrupted their entire conversation. And I was like; I don’t fucking care! I had to say it!”
So why did King really move to Nashville? Easy, she says. “Because people are fucking happy here! I was miserable in Hollywood, and I had no idea that you could actually enjoy this as a career. I had no idea that people listened to you or that my ideas were valid, and I needed to stick to them.
“So country music changed my life. Hell, country music probably saved my life!”
Category: Cover Story, Featured
