Donald Greyeagle Gritt

On a deserted West Texas road, at a “no facilities” rest stop, sits an aging, grizzled figure of a man next to a rusted pickup truck. With his guitar he plucks out the parts to a new song inspired by a swarm of flies and some roadkill that is past its prime.

In a dimly-lit bar in the humid bayous of East Texas a man and his band of Unusual Suspects perform before an enthusiastic but confused audience – the man has forgotten the lyrics to his own song.

Taken aside into a glass-walled anteroom, a man stands stoically as a corporate executive with bad breath verbally abuses him for spilling a tamale pie into the studio mixer.

The man described above is Donald Greyeagle Gritt. Whether tunneling out of a Mexican jail or scraping the barnacles off of the hull of a shrimp boat, music is always foremost in his mind. Although he is reluctant to talk about himself, he does say of his backup band, “They are a bunch of wild animals with this unexplainable sexual magnetism. A woman knows she’s spent the weekend with someone in the band if the motel bed sheets wind up looking like a car windshield after a long road trip.”

This album and a half, A Snootful of Gritt, is stuffed up to its neck warmer with songs. Perhaps no one is more qualified to describe the album than Donald Greyeagle Gritt himself:

“It’s not so much an album anymore, seein’ as they are gonna chop it up and sell it piecemeal like a stolen SUV. This album represents days of hard work over many years . . . oh, and a half-hearted desire to pay back the $83,000 advance from the record company. They say we blew all that money on wine, women, and song – but actually we were pretty light on the song.”

As the sun sets in the west, a phantom horseman heads east following the wind left behind by his ancestors. Riding a spotted horse, the man is wearing only his hat and a pair of (mostly) white boxer shorts. That’s no man. That’s a musician and a poet. That’s Donald Greyeagle Gritt.