Why Jeff Tweedy deserves Roots N Blues festival's highest honor

Friday, on the first evening of this year's Roots N Blues festival, Jeff Tweedy will join a strange and select group.

The Wilco frontman, sometimes solo act and record producer will keep company with Chuck Berry, local ragtime legend John William "Blind" Boone and Sheryl Crow, entering the festival's Missouri Roots Songbook — and perhaps forming a truly unique answer to the worn-out party question, "Which group of musicians, living or dead, would you have over on a Friday night?"

Equivalent to the festival's hall of fame, each year the Missouri Roots Songbook honors "one musician who is originally from or has spent a significant part of their music career in the state of Missouri," tipping a wide-brimmed hat to their cultural contributions.

Tweedy qualifies on every front. While an Illinois native, his first significant band — alt-country pioneers Uncle Tupelo — molded Missouri music, making records from just across the border, then traversing state lines to play Columbia early and often. Before a Wilco visit in 2012, Tweedy told me just how much our college town meant to that earlier ensemble.

"For a band that grew up in Belleville, Illinois, the first step was getting to St. Louis, and that felt like a real triumph for us at the time. But I think there’s something about Columbia being the first town … we ever really played outside of our home," he said. "It feels like it’s where everything kind of started."

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From the ruins of Uncle Tupelo, Wilco arose; now centering himself as far away as Chicago, Tweedy's sound judgment again radiates out to Missouri, the greater Midwest and beyond. For these accomplishments alone, he deserves to scrawl his name next to Berry, Boone and Crowe.

Tracing Tweedy's influence on my eyes and ears, I recognize a deeper justification. Wilco's music entered my life at full volume, when I crossed the threshold of my collegiate apartment to hear my roommate spinning the band's album-long quantum leap "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" as loud as the dial allowed.

In the noise collage, and eventual melodic clarity, of opening track "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," I heard Tweedy and Co. doing something I wouldn't have language for until years later — when Tweedy himself supplied the missing words.

"Nothing is simple, nothing's just one emotion. I don't think anybody ever has one emotion at one time," he said some 13 years after "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" in an interview with The Quietus.

Sometimes another person's plain statement frees you to understand something instinctive, letting the idea wash over you as if for the first time. In Tweedy's words, I read the heart of my own artistic life and practice. And saw the blueprint for everything he and Wilco do. The band brilliantly holds sounds — from lush folk and early country to art-school rock — and sentiments in tentative balance, its art imitating the very stuff of life.

Certainly, when I survey my favorite Wilco songs — and listen close to their sum — I hear this principle at work.

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On "I'm Always in Love," Tweedy answers his own casting call, playing the romantic forever on the edge of ruin. "Via Chicago" is a sustained cry for home, in the voice of someone prone to dark thoughts.

"Yankee Hotel Foxtrot"-mates "Jesus Etc." and "Reservations" live out their lives as unsentimental — and thus, truly authentic — love songs. The former hushes a hurting lover ("Jesus, don't cry," Tweedy sings. "You can rely on me, honey.") while watching the surrounding world collapse in what feels like a 9/11 prophecy. The latter rests upon the beauty of covenant, even to the coldest, most world-weary soul:

"I've got reservations / About so many things / But not about you," Tweedy croons.

"Ashes of American Flags," another "YHF" standout, witnesses Tweedy trying to break a hundred-dollar bill in one breath, wondering "why we listen to poets when nobody gives a f--k" in the next; never has he sounded more like a character pulled from the middle stanza of a William Carlos Williams epic.

On perhaps the greatest 1-2 punch in Wilco history — "Hummingbird" and "Handshake Drugs" from 2004's "A Ghost is Born" — Tweedy is a novelist, narrating the life of a man prone to bouts of dreaming, then adopting the shuffling first-person rhythms of a character headed downtown, up to no good.

"You Are My Face" sits in the first stages of bewilderment and anxiety ("I have no idea how this happens / All of my maps have been overthrown") while Tweedy's narrator is completely lost to their powers on "Bull Black Nova," increasingly unhinged, screaming "pick up" into the ringing end of a phone call.

In "You Never Know," he's a benevolent father figure who bears the scars of youthful pitfalls. And in "Story to Tell," from this year's "Cruel Country," Tweedy sounds most himself, a man pulling back the layers to find stories — glowing and strange — at the heart of his existence:

The world is always on the brinkHearts are smarter than you thinkWriting songs of death and doomFor all the voices inside of you

I have, with Tweedy, been all these men, hearing all these voices inside me. Sometimes two or three at a time. They buck against each other, talk over one another, yet broker some manner of peace. This co-existence underlines why Wilco has been one of my favorite bands for 20 years, and why I remain in love with Missouri since moving here in 2007.

Tweedy's songs bear out a truth, hidden under rocks and stashed between stations all across the Midwest. We are never just one side of ourselves, never beholden to just one emotion or truth. Average guys from Illinois can be poets and painters; they can twist Edward Hopper scenes into Jackson Pollock canvases, then head home at 5 to the wife and kids. So can guys who leave Arizona to settle in Middle America.

In this way, Tweedy models — for me and, no doubt, countless other listeners — what it is to live weird, beautiful Midwestern lives and call them normal. That blueprint is worth copying, that line of inheritance well worth honoring.

Wilco performs at 8:30 p.m. Friday on the EquipmentShare Stage. Learn more about Roots N Blues at https://rootsnbluesfestival.com/.

Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. Find him on Twitter @aarikdanielsen.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Tweedy deserving of inclusion in Roots N Blues' Missouri Roots Songbook