Ernie Palmer “A Teacher, a Preacher & a Bad Farmer”

Memories and tales of a veteran songwriter.

Ernie Palmer is a seventy-six-year-old retired schoolteacher from Cartersville, Georgia, who enjoys travelling and spending time with his family. Below this surface level, there are many interesting facts pertinent to his music and the stories there told. The son of a cemetery caretaker and a textile mill worker, Palmer grew up in a household often crowded with visitors and, consequently, full of stories. During his youth, he held various jobs ranging from bank employee to dump truck driver or binman before the start of what would become his lifelong occupation. In the late ’60s, Palmer enlisted in the army, serving as an infantryman in Vietnam for two years, an experience he was deeply influenced by and which later enabled him to study at university thanks to the GI Bill.

Palmer has a vast pool of experience and makes good use of it. “A Teacher, a Preacher & a Bad Farmer” is an album that combines personal experiences with tales born from the pure joy of storytelling. There are colourful vignettes of rural America, steeped in a narrative tradition of persecutions and long travels, chain-gangs and railway guards, bootlegging, murder, and love. Palmer is also greatly influenced by bluegrass and Appalachian music, as well as Texas songwriters such as Guy Clarke or Nanci Griffith, though the album’s sound wisely expands to encompass other styles, befitting the story told in each song. The choices in instrumentation and tone demonstrate thoughtfulness in the production process, in which Palmer was assisted by bluegrass players Jay Rudd and Aaron Zimmer. For the recording, they were also accompanied by Vito Gutila on fiddle and Taylor Swan on pedal steel (among other instruments).

Palmer’s creativity is inspiring, seeing as he was able to balance his teaching career with prolific songwriting and can boast of having written over 150 songs. It’s always somewhat surprising to think about the number of people who explore their creative side without ever making a career out of it, often not even trying or wanting to. And it does seem that the notion of creativity as a professional path has supplanted that of it simply being a personality trait. In this sense, it’s great to discover someone like Ernie Palmer, who represents a different type of songwriter than you might be used to.

‘Night Shift’ is one of the album’s standout tracks, a plaintive tale of lost love whose narrator reminisces about the past while working at a small café “Before there were fast food joints when nothing was open and all you had was a cheap cup of coffee and silence.” But even if a shadow of sadness hovers over the words, like with the rest of the album, there’s a sense of gratefulness for life that seeps through every track.