Country-Opera Queen of Arkansas: BONNIE MONTGOMERY

BY GARRETT CASH
HONKY TONK TIMES CONTRIBUTOR
PHOTOS BY Jamie Lacombe
ISSUE 24, March 2024

Bonnie Montgomery is both a Country and Opera singer from Arkansas. She sits down here with Garrett Cash to discuss her background, Opera career, interest in Arkansas heritage, and process for creating her own brand of country music on her new album River.

Garrett: I’m so glad to talk with you about this new album, River. It was sent to me by our founder, Taylor Austin, and he knows that what you’re doing is in my wheelhouse. When I listened to it, I immediately really enjoyed it. I’ve also been deep diving into all your past music, so it’s been fun just to get to discover you in addition to preparing for this.

One thing that I really found interesting about you is your Arkansas heritage, which has played a role in your musical identity and lyrical content. It’s a place with rich Country music history. You not only have Johnny Cash being from there, but Conway Twitty and Charlie Rich too. Glen Campbell and Lefty Frizzell, etc. How did this Arkansas story play into shaping you?

Bonnie: I was raised in a place where they say the Ozarks meet the Delta. It’s a town called Searcy, in North Central Arkansas between Little Rock and Memphis. So it had this Delta feeling. My dad’s side of the family is all from the Ozarks in North Arkansas in the mountains. So I had this sort of split upbringing between a Delta situation and then Ozarks. I got exposed to a lot of Bluegrass and authentic Appalachia “trickle-down” music that was around my dad’s side of the family’s history. My grandparents started a music store in the ‘60s, and it was on the Court Square in Searcy. We were sort of the center of a musical community. Then there’s a lot of different genres. There’s a lot of Blues and a lot of Gospel music, Soul music and Country. I was exposed to a lot of Classical too because we just knew everybody. I feel like I got infused with every influence that merges in Arkansas just naturally in my upbringing, so I’m really lucky on that one.

Garrett: I heard you describe yourself in a recent podcast interview as being “post-genre.”

Bonnie: It gets really old to be put in boxes. Then everybody seems so shocked that there are these different influences all on one album, but to me, it is just totally natural. A lot of my influences are like Linda Ronstadt, who had all those different elements. I feel like back in her day it was more common to have a total Rock and Roll album that included steel guitar all the way through it. Nobody thought twice about that being like a genre-bending moment. Now I feel like everybody likes to deeply understand all the boundaries and the boxes that everything is in, and I just don’t see it that way. Linda’s a big guiding light for me. So is Willie Nelson because he wrote what I would consider American standards. He was the first Country artist to get the Gershwin award [Prize]...I feel that his songwriting is so outside the bounds of really any genre, except just really dang good songs.

Garrett: One of the things I thought was cool about your life story is that you kind of have a reverse stereotype in there. There’s certain stereotypes in musical artist bio-pics that have been parodied and rehashed frequently, and one of the main ones is: “the parents trying to force Classical music on you then you had to break free from to play Rock and Roll or Country.” You always see somebody making a monologue about breaking free from boring Classical music and playing the fun stuff instead, and you have the opposite story.

Bonnie: I had never even heard of Opera or seen one until I was 15 because it was just not around me. I started because my family was so plugged in with all the teachers and piano tuners, plus all the session players (some of them even from Sun Records). I had access to anything musical that I wanted, and I loved Classical. They started me on actual Classical lessons on the piano when I was three, a crazy age to start. I was always drawn to it. I would just spend hours and hours at the piano practicing. When I discovered Opera later, it was this opening up of a new new side of Classical music for me. My grandpa who started the music store was such an awesome Country dude. He would love for me to play piano and sometimes he’d say, “play me ‘Born to Lose’ and quit playing that long hair music.” “Long hair music” you would think was hippies like Gram Parsons, but he was talking about ancient Bach music!

Garrett: Granted, that’s what The Beatles and Byrds were doing!

Bonnie: Yes! He was one of my best friends and my greatest supporters. When I was young, one time we were watching the Grammys, and there was an Opera moment. I think it was the Opera, A Streetcar Named Desire. The Opera singer came out in a big red dress and the orchestra was behind her. He watched it for a minute. Then he turned to me and said, “Is that what you’re wanting to do?” I said yes, and he said, “Damn, you’re gonna do it!” So I thought that was good because I got his support. I kind of blew the minds of my grandparents’ generation and got a scholarship to go to college on a voice scholarship. That was the direction all my teachers and everybody were pushing me towards and I loved it. I just loved studying it and diving into all the history of Opera and storylines. Opera people think it’s so high brow but the subject of Opera is very much like Country music: just lyin’, cheatin’, stealin’, and murder! It’s a very colorful subject matter. I really didn’t see a big difference. Besides the technique and the formality of the genre, there were times where I thought the only real difference between these genres is just the etiquette and the time that the show starts.

Garrett: There’s so many crossover elements in Country music and Opera music, for instance they have a similar interest in gaudy fashion. As you said, the subject matter is focused on storytelling. Opera is the Classical version of storytelling. It’s to Classical what Country music is to the last century of popular music. Country music and Opera also both have this dynamic way of using emotional build up, like in Billy Sherrill productions. At one point you wrote an Opera based on the Arkansas childhood of 42nd President Bill Clinton, how did that come about?

Bonnie: The interest in the Clinton Opera really came from my interest in Arkansas History. Because I just was seeing Arkansas as this mythological place where some big personalities who shaped our modern culture have come out of. I wanted to know what was going on there, was there something in the water? What’s the influence on all these different little towns? Why do they have this personality? I also have an interest in Bill Clinton, not even politically, but just as a person from my home state that had such a big dream and came from nothing. His family wasn’t in politics; they weren’t wealthy. He had a dream of being the president and achieved it. I was reading his autobiography, and then his mother wrote an autobiography. It’s called Leading with My Heart: My Life. She was a vibrant, full of life woman who was a huge character in Hot Springs, AR. She was a pillar of the community and wrote this amazing book, and her book inspired everything in the Opera. The first six chapters of Bill Clinton’s autobiography are what I took the subject matter from because when I was reading it, I had just finished grad school. I’d been in a lot of Operas and studied a lot of Opera, and those scenes from his childhood struck me as operatic. It was like a vision I couldn’t stop seeing on the stage with amplified emotions. I sat down and composed it, and I have a poet friend who wrote all the lyrics. I would ruminate on those lyrics, and then we would talk about the different things that needed to be in it. The Opera just takes place in one day, it’s a snapshot in 1959 when Clinton was 14. It’s more of a portrait of Arkansas at that time, or more specifically Hot Springs at that time, which is an interesting town with a big history of gambling and prostitution, and the hot springs and mineral waters. The city itself is a character. I ended up sitting at the piano making a little composition schedule for myself, and then it just blew up. It actually blew up before I was finished writing it. So I had to finish it really fast, it was a whirlwind after that doing it in New York City.

Garrett: Are you still writing Classical music in addition to your Country work?

Bonnie: Yes, and I wrote a lot in the pandemic that I haven’t actually premiered or released. The challenge with being into different “genres,” is that I do have to kind of decide where I’m going to focus my energy for certain blocks of time. Because getting those out correctly in the right venues with the right players, is a whole other job. I wrote a string quartet during the pandemic, and then a lot of little piano etudes. I had an event on the books for Carnegie Hall in November of 2020, which got canceled. I learned how to primal scream that day. We were just doing our best during the pandemic. I have some big Opera ideas. If I could just get some blocks of time to sit down and compose I’m ready. I would also like to maybe venture into the Broadway world. Make it more of a musical than an Opera and see what happens with that. I’m always composing, I always have something on the burner. I hope I can get back to some of that after we’ve done this album cycle, which I’m so excited about. Classical lights me up in a different way. It’s a different rhythm to be in that world.

Garrett: Well, when you get ready to do an Opera about Conway Twitty let me know. You had started work on an album with Rosie Flores and released a few singles with her before doing this new album. How did you end up getting to River after that?

Bonnie: The last full length was Forever, and we cut that all in three days with the band in the same room in Austin. Ever since then I couldn’t wait to get in and do a studio album live with more time. And because I sort of felt like Forever could have been something totally different if we didn’t have the time constraints. So I’d already been thinking the next one needs to be the full treatment. I needed to be on piano because I don’t play piano live at my gigs at all, because I hate electronic pianos and hardly any venues have acoustic pianos. I just write on the piano a lot, but I wanted to be on the piano in the studio for the next record I was going to cut. Then the pandemic happened, and then we all just had so much more time and didn’t have to get on the road and do shows and write a million emails about all that. It all just kind of happened serendipitously because my friend Kevin, who had been in my band all these years, had completed the studio he’d been building for years and his studio is so beautiful. It’s a lot of analog vintage equipment and a great piano. Because it was my bandmate and friends, we were able to take time. I engineered it sometimes too, which was crazy because it was just the two of us in the studio because of the pandemic. I had been writing songs and brought them all in, and we just decided which ones fit. The natural process.

Garrett: It felt like the lyrical content of the album and the stories that you’re telling on there came from having more meditation and time to reflect on your own life and different things along that line because a lot of the songs on here specifically reference your own life, your stories. Was that a part of the change towards that direction as well?

Bonnie: Oh yeah, big time. I felt like I was sort of lifting the veil a little bit. This is really literal and true. There’s no metaphor to it. A lot of the songs that I was writing are just really just out front with the emotion. If anybody really knows me, they know exactly what it’s about. Like there’s no secretive poetry to it. It’s just blatant, I was processing a lot. I think all of us were during that time, and I feel really blessed that we had that time to stop and let a lot of things surface that had been pushed down because we were all so busy and didn’t have time to address it.

Then I got trained in Reiki during the pandemic and that opened up a whole spiritual element to my life.

Garrett: The song “Seventeen” was really one of the ones that I was impressed by because it’s about something that happened in your life that was traumatic and was difficult to experience at a young age. The song is from the perspective of your friend who tragically passed. I thought it was powerful how you were able to take something that was a real life event, not something you constructed, and then turn it into something that fit within the realm of the musical heritage we’ve been talking about. Was that something you were thinking about?

Bonnie: I’m so glad that “Seventeen” is what jumped out. I feel like “Seventeen” is probably my strongest song that I’ve ever written and the most poetic, but yet also personal. It was really hard to think about ever writing a song about that event because the emotions were so big. When I imagined it from Colin’s perspective —he’s the guy that drowned that day — then the emotion didn’t overtake me and I could write it from his perspective instead of mine. I think a big part of getting that story out in a song was actually shifting the perspective from mine to his. Then it all flowed out because I always have thought every year I turn a new age, Colin stayed 17. I don’t know why that resonates with me. Colin never knew 18 or 19 or 35. Telling the story was just natural because that’s how it happened. It was such a beautiful spring day. That’s always what stuck with me about being so young and seeing that; you never think that something like that could happen on such a pretty day. The picturesque nature of the whole story was already there. I had tried to record “Seventeen” several times and it didn’t work. So me and Kevin knew coming in that we were going to try this again. He got the bongos out and it kind of sounded like water lapping around the rocks. When Jeff, my fiddle player got in there, I said “make it sound like water rushing around.” He did! Then we took out all the electric guitar and replaced it with acoustic because I wanted that organic earthy sound. We finally got it. It sounds like what I wanted it to sound like. So I’m really proud of “Seventeen.”

Garrett: I noticed that there was this Faulknerian running theme throughout River of family history. “Leon” is about your grandfather. “River” is based on a story from your father. “Check for Your Time” is about a broken family.

Bonnie: Being able to write about it was so healing. I think music and especially writing a song about something is sort of the greatest therapy because it transforms it out into the world and it takes the weight of it off my shoulders. I don’t know how that’s possible. It’s a miracle in this world. A lot of it is about real stuff and it really helped to get it out there and transform it into a song.

Garrett: The album just came out recently, are we going to see any touring from you for it that people should keep an eye out for?

Bonnie: A lot of stuff in 2024 is still in the works, but that’s the plan is to get it out there. Post-pandemic is such a new world for me. I used to go coast to coast playing every Honky Tonk between New York and California, and that’s not really as sustainable now. I plan on getting out there. It may just be a different way of doing it, maybe more in chunks and seasons, than to just go and go and go without stopping.

Garrett: What do you think about some of the terms that have been applied to your career and basically the Country music as it’s called now in general? I saw that at one point for the Ameripolitan Awards you were voted the Female Outlaw of The Year. Which I find interesting because I listen to your music and what I hear is the Nashville sound, which I love. Then you’re being voted female outlaw by an organization called Ameripolitan, and most publications are calling you Americana. What do you think about all these different terms, do you agree with it? Would you just call yourself a Country artist or something else?

Bonnie: Well, the Outlaw thing I’ve always just loved. I wasn’t quite sure if it’s describing the genre I was playing in or just my attitude or my criminal background. To me, Outlaw meant freedom and it was fulfilling that they were recognizing that I didn’t really fit in an exact box and that that even included Opera for me. Dale Watson and all them knew everything I was up to. I felt like that was like an endorsement of rebellion for me in my life and in my music, which for me has meant Opera in my life. Rebelling and going Opera is what I’ve done. It’s like what we were saying about being post-genre. When I fall under the umbrella of Americana or Country or Outlaw or whatever, I just think that’s the way that my music can be understood by certain demographics of people. I don’t really think of it as my identity or anything like that.

Garrett: It seems that, like what a lot of people have done is say, “I’m going to dig my heels in on what is marketable. I can easily sell myself to this demographic that wants songs about slammin’ down whiskey or whatever.” Then you have a built-in audience that already eats that stuff up, whereas you’ve taken the route of being an Outlaw by writing about you and what you’ve lived through. You’re one of the few artists that I could truly read through your lyrics and clearly see a personal expression all the way through and it didn’t seem like you were pandering to anybody.

Bonnie: A lot of my friends and colleagues are a little more focused on marketing. I might even say they’re more business smart than me. I do think that they approach their music thinking about how it’s gonna, you know, perform in the market and who the audience is and stuff like that. Whereas I’m trying to just survive and get all this stuff that’s keeping me awake at night swirling in my head down on paper. It’s not about the end game. For me, it’s about just living in the artist’s mind and trying to get it out there in a way that you’re hearing it inside your head.

Bonnie Montgomery’s new album River is currently available from Gar Hole Records.

Photo by: Jamie Lacombe