Tag Archives: Country

Various Artists: Feel Like Going Home – The Songs of Charlie Rich

various_feellikegoinghomeA tribute to Charlie Rich’s Sun-era songwriting

Though Charlie Rich found his greatest fame as a Nashville country crooner for Epic, the soul of his music was born in Memphis. Rich’s smooth countrypolitan ballads topped the charts in the mid-70s, but it was in fact a departure from the jazz, blues, rockabilly, gospel and soul flavors of his earlier work. And it’s those earlier flavors that are revisited here, as thirteen artists – including Charlie Rich, Jr. – perform songs written and performed by Rich during his years as an artist, sideman and songwriter for Sun and Phillips International.

In addition to the well-known “Lonely Weekends” (given a bluesy treatment by Jim Lauderdale) and “Who Will the Next Fool Be” (sung with sultry southern soul by Holli Mosley), the set includes non-charting singles and B-sides. Highlights include the Malpass Brothers’ crooned “Caught in the Middle,” Juliet Simmons Dinallo’s hot rockabilly “Whirlwind,” Johnny Hoy’s wailing “Don’t Put No Headstone On My Grave,” Keith Sykes’ snakebit “Everything I Do Is Wrong,” and Kevin Connolly’s heartfelt closing title song.

The sessions were held primarily in the same post-Sun Sam Phillips Recording studio that hosted Rich for the originals, and the collection has been released on the same Phillips International label. You can find Rich’s original sides on the single disc The Complete Singles Plus: The Sun Years 1958-1963, or the deeper box sets Lonely Weekends: The Sun Years, 1958-1962 and The Complete Sun Masters, but these new takes are a treat, as Rich’s early work informs new generations of musicians with his unique blend of country, blues, rock, soul, gospel and jazz. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Various Artist: Highway Prayer – A Tribute to Adam Carroll

various_highwayprayeratributetoadamcarrollSome of Americana’s finest songwriters salute a peer

It’s one thing for a songwriter to be fêted with a tribute album at the relatively young at of 42, but to be honored by a who’s who of one’s peers speaks louder than words. And with the likes of James McMurtry, Hayes Carll and Slaid Cleaves having satchels full of terrific original material, their willingness to saddle up a favorite from Adam Carroll’s catalog is both a tributary offering and an artistic opportunity. The largely acoustic productions of Jenni Finlay and Brian T. Atkinson rightly leave the limelight on lyrics whose emotional resonance is immediate, and whose meters are so natural that they barely sound composed.

Each performer finds a natural fit to their chosen song, with the Band of Heathens’ digging a gospel groove for “Oklahoma Gypsy Shuffler” and Matt the Electrician adding anxious fingerpicking to “Old Town Rock ‘n’ Roll.” There’s two-stepping mandolin and steel as Noel McKay and Brennen Leigh sing the story of Bob, the “Karaoke Cowboy,” and Walt Wilkins explores a showman’s life in “Highway Prayer.” Carroll’s lyrics derive from fleeting moments, snapshots whose studied details conjure life stories. His narratives drop their baggage on the platform to chase expectation down the tracks, one step ahead of consequence.

Carroll slips easily between observed detail and poetic flight, framing everyday images as literary moments. He’s particularly adept at portraiture, whether it’s a colorful hustler, a rural taxi driver or a karaoke singer, he sees what you might feel, but couldn’t verbalize, capturing a person’s essence in the details of their physical being and actions. The titles draw heavily from Carroll’s first two albums, South of Town and Lookin’ Out the Screen Door, as well as 2008’s Old Town Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Carroll himself appears at CD’s end to honor “My Only Good Shirt.” It’s a sweet way to close this tribute to a much loved songwriter. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Adam Carroll’s Home Page

Zach Schmidt: The Day We Lost the War

zachschmidt_thedaywelostthewarPittsburgh keeps its hold on an East Nashville singer-songwriter

Zach Schmidt’s a Pittsburgh native who relocated to East Nashville, closer to, but still a river crossing and an artistic universe away from the country music industry. His first full-length album is the product of five years of songwriting, an Indiegogo fundraising campaign and the musical contributions of friends who tracked, mixed and mastered the album in two days of live sessions. It’s a mark of the talent in Schmidt’s tight-knit musical community that two days was plenty of time to get ten solid masters on tape. It probably helps that the songwriter had been polishing his songs over the years in front of or with these very musicians, as their affection for the material is heard in the shuffling drums, bending steel and twanging guitars.

Schmidt’s mood echoes the weary side of Guitar Town-era Steve Earle, and while his protagonists are often tired and defeated, they still manage to muster a look forward. The nowhere town of the title track is a jail in which hope has faded, and from which escape seems unlikely. In Schmidt’s world, a lifetime of hard work may be redeemed in the hereafter or taken away in the blink of the eye, but either way, your burdens are what carry you forward. His songs are populated with orphans and widows, the departing, and on James Maple’s “Buried in Burgundy,” the departed. Schmidt sings with the twang of his adopted Nashville, but the rust of his native Pittsburgh has clearly left its mark. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Zach Schmidt’s Home Page

Dwight Yoakam: Swimmin’ Pool, Movie Stars

dwightyoakamswimminpoolsmoviestarsSwaggering bluegrass reinterpretations of Yoakam highlights

Commercial country music has become so commoditized by its formulas that it’s often difficult to recognize who you’re listening to. Not so with Dwight Yoakam. Not ever with Dwight Yoakam. Not only is his voice a singular instrument, but so is his taste as an artist. Not that he’s ever sat still in a pigeonhole; he’s maintained a throughline of artistic integrity and fidelity to country music’s emotional foundation even as he stretched the boundaries of country with former partner Pete Anderson, lured Buck Owens back to work, and stripped down to solo guitar for the reassessment of 2000’s dwightyoakamacoustic.net. The outline of this latter solo acoustic jaunt is reprised here, but with a twist of bluegrass applied to catalog selections that favor deserving album tracks over hits.

Yoakam’s interest in bluegrass isn’t new – he was born in Kentucky (though raised in Ohio), and he’s recorded with both Ralph Stanley (“Down Where the River Bends” on Stanley’s Saturday Night & Sunday Morning and “Miner’s Prayer” on Dwight’s Used Records) and Earl Scruggs (“Borrowed Love” on Scruggs’ Earl Scruggs and Friends). He’s had his songs reimagined in bluegrass arrangements, having been paid tribute on 2004’s Pickin’ on Dwight Yoakam, and he’s featured bluegrass arrangements in his live show for several years. But this is the first time he’s settled down in the studio with a bluegrass band for his own album, and buoyed by the first class backing of Bryan Sutton, Stuart Duncan, Barry Bales, Adam Steffey and Scott Vestal, he finds new layers in eleven of his own compositions and a compelling cover of Prince’s “Purple Rain.”

The opening “What I Don’t Know” turns the original’s simmering accusation into an angry holler, and the lead vocal and harmonies of “These Arms” are sorrowful in a different way than the hard honky-tonk of the original. “Two Doors Down” is sung high and lonesome, without the tenderness and redemptive organ of the original or the stark introspection of the earlier acoustic take. As in his collaborations with Pete Anderson, Yoakam leans on his partners for both tradition and invention. His take on bluegrass is similar to his take on Bakersfield (and Bakersfield’s own take on country): knowledgeable, perhaps even reverent, but never slavish. Everyone clearly had a lot of fun reinterpreting these songs, and their spontaneity is infectious; you won’t put away the originals, but neither will you skip these remakes. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Dwight Yoakam’s Home Page

Marley’s Ghost: The Woodstock Sessions

marleysghost_thewoodstocksessionsVeteran roots group records in Woodstock with Larry Campbell

Thirty years into their career, Marley’s Ghost is like a well-worn leather jacket. You can admire their tenure intellectually, but up-close, with your ears, you can’t help but be moved by the effortless music their tenure has produced. The band’s breadth, interpersonal chemistry and instrumental skills create performance from the seemingly simpler act of music making. “Seemingly,” because it’s anything but simple for skills to be so completely second nature. With Larry Campbell as producer and recording in Levon Helm’s Woodstock studio, the group leaned heavily on a connoisseur’s selection of traditional material that includes titles written by the Delmores (“Field Hand Man”) and made famous by the Stanleys (“Stone Walls and Steel Bars”), Bill Monroe (“In the Pines”) and Carter Family (“The Storms Are on the Ocean”). The harmonies flow easily from blues to bluegrass to country to Cajun, and in “Run on for a Long Time,” to gospel. The album closes with the fiddle tune “Uncle Joe,” leaving listeners dancing to this journey through American roots music. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Marley’s Ghost’s Home Page

Linda Ronstadt: Silk Purse

lindaronstadt_silkpurseRonstadt’s second solo album returned to print

Originally reissued on CD in 1995, Capitol apparently allowed Linda Ronstadt’s second solo album to go out of print. Varese remedies the situation with this straight-up reissue of the album’s ten tracks, together with an eight-panel booklet that includes new liner note by Jerry McCulley. Upon the album’s original release in 1970, it bubbled under the Billboard Top 100 and launched the single “Long, Long Time” into the Top 40. Recorded in Nashville, Ronstadt mixed pop and country material, including Hank Williams’ take on the Tin Pan Alley standard “Lovesick Blues,” Mel Tillis’ “Mental Revenge,” Goffin & King’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” (which bubbled under the Top 100) and Dillard & Clark’s “She Darked the Sun.” Ronstadt returned to California for her self-titled third album, but this Southern sojourn was an important way-point in her development from a singer in the Stone Poneys to a full-blown solo star. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Lasers Lasers Birmingham: Royal Blue

LasersLasersBirmingham_RoyalBlueClassic country sounds meet modern-day experience

Ozark-native and Los Angeles-transplant Alex Owen writes in the idiom of twangy country music, but without draping himself in remembered rural sentiment. The album’s shuffling title track is pure Nashville heartache, but the lyric threads in modern vocabulary and cultural touchstones. The album’s lanky piano and crying steel accompany references to John Lennon’s lost weekend and Laurel Canyon, and the upbeat country shuffle “Hard Man to Please” finds guitarist John Schreffler Jr. dueling with himself on pedal steel and Telecaster. Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium provides the setting for an afternoon of stoner adventure, and “Anyway You Slice It” closes the EP on an acoustic note. Owen picked the band name as a portmanteau that evokes the nostalgic roots of Birmingham and the modernism of lasers, and his songs delivery exactly that. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Lasers Lasers Birmingham’s Bandcamp Page

Various Artists: On Top of Old Smoky – New Old-Time Smoky Mountain Music

Various_OnTopOfOldSmokyReviving the music of 1930s Appalachia

In the late 1930s, as those living on the land that became the Great Smoky Mountains National Park were leaving (some voluntarily, some forcibly) their homesteads, farms, mines and logging camps, folklorist Joseph Hall collected field recordings of their dialectical speech and music. Selections from those aluminum platters and acetate discs were first released by the Great Smoky Mountains Association on 2010’s Old-Time Smoky Mountain Music [1 2]. Six years later, the GSMA has commissioned contemporary performances of twenty-three traditional Appalachian songs and popular material that had made its way into the mountains via commercial recordings.

The new recordings use of fiddle, guitar and banjo lends the performances the sort of informal backporch feel that Hall captured with his original field work. Ted Olson’s liner notes provide a brief history of the national park’s foundation, detail on Hall’s research, brief song notes and lyric transcriptions. The material includes fiddle tunes, ballads, blues, children’s songs, rags, harmony duets, yodels, westerns and sacred songs. The range of music that was created in the isolated hollars of the Smokies is truly impressive, and these new performances add links to the folk music chain. Dolly Parton and Norman Blake are the name artists, but the entire cast does this music proud. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Great Smoky Mountain Association’s Home Page

Robert Rex Waller, Jr.: Fancy Free

RobertRexWallerJr_FancyFreeStellar covers album from I See Hawks in L.A. frontman

After seven albums with I See Hawks in L.A., singer-songwriter Robert Rex Waller, Jr. decided it was time to step out for a solo album. But unlike singer-songwriters who want to work a cache of songs that weren’t right for the band, Waller endeavored to escape his own writing by waxing an album full of cover songs. The album rambles through well known hits and deep album cuts, drawing a picture of Waller’s personal musical tapestry. Among the best known titles are a lovely piano arrangement of the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” a Casio-based take on the Oak Ridge Boys’ “Fancy Free,” a synth backed version of the Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe,” and a Waylon-esque vocal on Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me.”

Cover songs are a unique opportunity for an artist to both pay tribute to and fuse with their influences. In the best case, the cover neither replaces nor leads inextricably to the original, but illuminates new dimensions of the song, its writer and its covering artist. And that’s exactly what we get as Waller takes us for a ride through the formation of his musical consciousness and into his present day imagination. He samples from the songbooks of Utah Phillips, Neil Young, Daniel Johnston and Mike Stinson, filling out a mythical jukebox that would keep you at the bar for a few more rounds. This is a deeply personal collection that will resound strongly with Waller’s fans. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Robert Rex Waller Jr.’s Home Page