Nashville, Tenn.

Last Wednesday, four days before Guy Clark's 70th birthday, such stalwart singer-songwriters from the Lone Star State as Joe Ely, Radney Foster, Ray Wylie Hubbard and Jerry Jeff Walker gathered to salute the man many identify as the very model of their kind at a tribute show in Austin, Texas. They are among 33 artists who appear on "This One's For Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark," a new double album of interpretations of his much honored, unforgettably etched songs. Some—"L.A. Freeway," "That Old Time Feeling," "Desperadoes Waiting for a Train"—are hits that Mr. Clark wrote in the 1970s, standards for folk, country and rock singers alike by now. Others—"Dublin Blues," "Stuff That Works," "Randall Knife," "Hemingway's Whiskey"—later added to that legacy.

Singer-songwriters from Texas celebrate Guy Clark's birthday with a tribute concert and new double album. Redferns

Mr. Clark produced most of those songs living not in his native Texas, but here in Nashville, where he has lived and worked for 40 years. We spoke recently in the combination songwriting studio and guitar-making shop he's long had in the basement of the home he shares with his painter-songwriter wife, Susanna. It's a setup that has often led journalists to make facile comparisons between song- and guitar-making. Add a 1995 anthology of his songs entitled "Craftsman" and you get a fallback cliché for describing Mr. Clark. Reasonably enough for a writer whose songs are as distinguishable as his guitars are similar, that doesn't please him:

"No, I don't like the 'craftsman' moniker. That's not all I am; I'm an artist. I could have stopped them from using that album title, but I must have been hung over or something. Now I don't know who to call to stop it. I love craftsmanship; you can see that in the guitars I build. But that's just something to do while I'm doing the real work, a right-brain/left-brain thing. If there's need for a little rest, you go over and fix a guitar and go into a zone completely free of writing or fixing that next verse. And then things pop in your head."

Verlon Thompson is one of the two respected singing, songwriting, picking aces who are regulars in Mr. Clark's band; the other is Shawn Camp. Mr. Thompson's key role on stage and his own lean, rhythmic story songs ("Joe Walker's Mare") are evident on Mr. Clark's new live album, "Songs and Stories," and on his own new CD, "Works." In a separate interview, Mr. Thompson spoke of what he sees as special about the songs of his friend and collaborator of almost 30 years:

"I think it's the way Guy distills a big life issue down to a fleeting moment in some character's word, or a look in the eye, till it's one drop in a potent concoction. A lot of times, it's what he leaves out that's the best part. He just gives you the first little brush stroke on the canvas, and you get it. They're not just songs that you play a bunch of licks to and noodle; you wait until there's a reason to play. It's like his songwriting—you only do what's necessary to make the song complete."

Most of the archetypal solitary Texas singer-songwriter's songs of the past decade have, in fact, been Nashville co-writes. "I have not written by myself in a while," Mr. Clark notes, "and it's because I really enjoy co-writing. Working with younger songwriters, like Shawn, or Jedd Hughes, I always learn something musically that never would have occurred to me. I really enjoy sitting in a room with somebody really bright, taking an idea for a song and exploring using the English language for the lyrics."

Younger writers, back to Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell in the '70s, have often spoken of the time Mr. Clark has taken with them as both encourager and taskmaster, pushing them to strive for the right, better phrase in their lyrics. Mr. Clark attributes that tendency to an early influence.

"My mother was kind of artsy-fartsy—read poetry, put on all the Christmas pageants, was extremely well read. Consequently, she was not so much correcting us all the time, growing up, but knowing what was right: 'You must not talk like those rednecks down the street'—period. I'm really lucky that I was exposed to that. We would sit around the dinner table and read out loud, poetry or a novel, or play Scrabble."

Later in life, Mr. Clark has had this office to work in every day, a marriage that has lasted decades, and an essentially quiet life that leaves room for wildness in the songs but does not spew legends—in clear contrast to his friend Townes Van Zandt, the troubled, addicted song-making genius who died in 1997 at age 52. As Mr. Clark sees it, van Zandt has too often been idealized for his personal dramas rather than celebrated for his gifts.

"I don't know why romanticizing tortured souls seems to be such a common human thought, but it seems like that happens with a lot of artists—a Caravaggio getting killed in a duel, or a Johnny Cash or Hank Williams. Townes was the smartest guy I've ever met. When he got just the right chemical balance between alcohol and whatever, he'd be just deadly funny. But he was definitely tortured, and there were points where I couldn't be around it, and I just had to walk away and wish him good luck."

After one knee replacement, with another still to come, Mr. Clark has lately been performing sitting down, and avoiding airplanes. But he still made it to Austin for that salute, and still says, as he has over those four decades in Nashville, that he'd return to Texas to live if he "could ever just break even." He admits, though, that "all in all, I've had a hell of a time. I wish the Mexican food was better, but I've really got no complaints."

Mr. Mazor writes about country, roots and pop music for the Journal.