You Ain’t Heard  Lonesome Yet

“It’s one of those wonderful lines that trips magically off the tongue,” said Donna Ulisse of the title of the song “You Ain’t Heard Lonesome Yet,” cowritten with husband Rick Stanley and cut by Doyle Lawson. 

“We have a little island out in the kitchen of our ‘Little House,’” said Ulisse, referring to where she hosts songwriting workshops and other gatherings. “It seems to be the spot where everybody lands. So, it was one of those nights, and I can’t remember who all was crammed in there. We were talking about how ‘lonesome’ something sounded, and Rick said, ‘Until you come to the Clinch Mountains and my mom and daddy’s cabin there, you ain’t heard lonesome yet.’ We just looked at each other, then, like, ‘There’s one if we’ve ever heard it.’

 “He was thinking of the ‘high, lonesome’ sound of his dad’s music,” Ulisse explained of her husband’s “golden” line. “His dad, Richard Ervin Stanley, was a close cousin of Carter and Ralph [Stanley] and grew up in Dickerson County, Virginia, playing guitar and fiddle. The cousins would play music together and that ‘Stanley sound’ came out of those hollows and ridge tops. The Clinch Mountains are beautifully lonesome … so Rick was voicing his idea that, ‘until you’ve heard where it was created and originally played, you ain’t heard lonesome yet.’” 

Days later, with that mournful hook settled in her mind–and also thinking of a good friend who had just lost his wife–Ulisse sat down and began whittling a lyric before pulling Stanley in to help with parts of the melody. “I always have a melody in mind when I write, so that’s mine on the verses,” she recalled, “but I knew the song was better than where I was taking it melodically. When I really need some ‘mountain’ in it, I bring it to Rick…I call him the Melody Doctor. He gave it that lift and had tears in his eyes as he was playing it, so we knew it was right. It allowed the vocals to soar on an important part of the song, and emotionally, it just clicked. When we finished, I knew we had written something special and that I had tapped into this gentleman’s sorrow to do it.”

Looking at a Lyric

Can you picture a sound? Ulisse managed it well, painting the sounds of loneliness with vivid lyrics easily associated with the feeling and its resonances – birds (Some say the dove sings with pain and regret), wind (Some think the howl of the wind cries the best…), and trains (Some swear the moan of the midnight express…). She mined also for the less common, yet fitting imagery of a loved one dying and the soundless aftermath (Til you’ve held love tight, watched it draw the last breath / And the sound of that silence is all you have left). 

And then there’s the unmistakable sound captured in the line most pivotal to Ulisse, Nothin screams louder than stone marking death til sorrow rings out and the angels have wept. As she wrote—and heard and felt—that piercing line, she knew she’d had some help. “Whatever beyond this earth gave me the lyrics,” said Ulisse, “it happened quickly, and I’m so grateful.”

 Although “You Ain’t Heard Lonesome Yet” hasn’t been out to radio all that long (it’s Lawson’s current single), fans have been expressing their appreciation. “Doyle recently sent me a beautiful email from a fan—a gentleman who had lost his wife, and he was telling Doyle how he loved the song. He said, ‘line for line,’ it was what he was going through. Doyle said, ‘This brought tears to my eyes, and I thought it would bring tears to yours, too.’ It did.”

 Lawson, who cut the song with his band Quicksilver, called it “the epitome” of what the loss of a loved one is about. “At the essence of a song—whether it be happy, sad, gospel, or secular—I look at what it has to say,” he said. “I don’t think you can describe the pain of loss any better than she did, she and Rick.  Donna is one of my favorite singer songwriters. Had I never produced a note for her, she would remain so,” continued Lawson, who has enjoyed producing Ulisse on Billy Blue Records for coming-up-on three albums now. “She has an incredible ability to get inside a story and tell it in ways that I wish I could.”

Whose Song Is It, Anyway?      Lawson was in the studio cutting songs for his band’s last album, Roundtable, when he first heard Ulisse’s song. “I’ll be honest with you, I had already recorded a song called, ‘I’ll Take The Lonesome Every Time,’ written by Glen Duncan and Jerry Salley. But when Donna sent this song along to me, I just thought, ‘Wow! I’ve got to record that,’” recalled Lawson, his decision a testament to the power of a great song. “At the time, I didn’t realize that she wanted to know if it would be a good one for her to record. Later, I told her ‘I stole your song, and I didn’t really mean to.’” 

  Ulisse smiles when she thinks back to sending Lawson the song with herself in mind—and consequently thinking he didn’t much care for it. “We were starting to look for songs for my new project. Doyle was going to produce, so I sent it to him. I had heard he was doing a record, but I’d also heard that his band was going to write it, so I didn’t even think about mentioning that this one might be for my album. I just said, ‘Hey Chief—Hot off the presses. What do you think?’  Well, I never got a blip off his radar, so I was thinking, ‘Wow, I can’t believe he doesn’t like that one … I just knew he’d want to cut that on me. Back to the drawing board, I guess.’”

 A few days later, all became clear to Ulisse when Lawson called to say he had cut the song, with Quicksilver’s Ben James (guitar, tenor harmony) on the lead vocal. “Ben sang the fool out of it, and it was a wonderful surprise,” said Ulisse, noting that it was especially memorable for Lawson to cut the song right then, as he was retiring. “When they all sang it during Doyle’s last live performance, we were in the audience. I bawled like a baby. I was thinking to myself, ‘we’ll probably never hear it live again.’”

  “I’m happy to say that she did approve of my recording it,” smiled Lawson, “but aside from all that, the fact is that life is never a consistent thing, day after day. Along with the happiness comes the sting of heartbreak, heartache, the loss of a loved one, divorce, whatever. That’s the other side of life.” 

   In other words, and as this song shows us, until you live it – the bad with the good, the sorrow with the happiness—“You Ain’t Heard Lonesome Yet.”