Free Diamond in the Rough by Shawn Colvin Page A

get the right memo about Bud.
    I was to replace Julie Griffin, one of the deepest, purest singers and songwriters ever. She was Buddy’s girlfriend at the time (and is now his wife) but had had enough of bars and bands and brawls and vans and boys and smoke and sawdust and beer, and she went back home to Texas. I accepted the job and moved to New York in November of 1980.
    Buddy must have been really bereft when Julie left the band. After all, he left to join her less than a year later. He never showed it, though. Our band was close, but we didn’t confide in each other. Our private lives were private, or as private as they could be while we were living out of a van together. I knew that Bud liked Chinese-Cuban food and had the most extensive record collection of any of us. I knew he could sing and play the guitar like a maniac, there being a complete disconnect between this gentle soul and this ferocious player.
    I saw Bud now and then over the years after he left New York. He and Julie came to visit and showed up at my gig at the Lone Star Cafe. Buddy managed to record my set off the board and still talks about it. That’s Bud, the archivist. He joined Emmylou Harris’s band, and I happened to see him in Memphis around 1995 while both Emmy and I were there. Over the breakfast table, he took out a bootleg CD and pushed it across the table to me. “Listen to this,” he said, and I looked at the disc. Patty Griffin. It was the first album she’d recorded with a producer, and it never saw the light of day, but upon first listen I was completely blown away. And now I’m in a band called Three Girls and Their Buddy, with Emmy, Patty, and Buddy. This is evidence of good karma, surely.
    How do I explain Buddy Miller? He is made of music. He is made of light. He’s like your best big brother and your sweetest child. There is no one kinder. He once gave me a book called How to Torture Your Children. It was Buddy who recently turned me on to Some Kind of Monster, the Metallica documentary. On tour he gifted us with plush monkey toys that flew and screamed. He reveals little about himself but steps up to the plate as a producer, something I’m about to be witness to, since he’s going to produce my next record. Buddy and Patty just won a Grammy for the gospel record he produced for her. Bud has religion, but he doesn’t preach it, he lives it.
    We almost lost Bud in 2009. Three Girls and Their Buddy were touring. In Baltimore, Buddy confessed after a show to having acute indigestion, but Carolyn, our tour manager, thought it was more than that. She carted him off to the Johns Hopkins ER, where it was determined he was having not acute indigestion but a massive heart attack. He was stabilized—only barely, though. By early the next morning, the surgeons opened him up and performed a triple bypass. It’s notable that instead of having three major arteries going into his heart, as most people do, Buddy possesses four. He has a special heart. This fourth artery was not completely blocked, and it, along with Carolyn and Johns Hopkins, saved his life. It’s a good thing, too, because once God did get the memo on Buddy, I can assure you he broke the mold.
    But back to 1980. The Buddy Miller Band consisted of its namesake, myself, Lincoln Schleifer on bass, Karl Himmel on drums, and Larry Campbell on everything—guitar, pedal steel, fiddle, and mandolin. Years later, when the movie Dances with Wolves came out, Larry’s wife dubbed him “Walks with Instruments.” Buddy found Karl in Nashville, I believe, and knew of his work with Neil Young. Larry and Lincoln were young New York City boys ripe for the picking, and Buddy sniffed them out somehow. I have been in a lot of vans with boys and should know more than I woefully do about how men operate. I recall things like the time Lincoln was snoring in the backseat. I tape-recorded him and called the piece “Mammals of the Bronx.” The only thing I can say with certainty is that