`Mountain' man
* Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band produce a fine blend of
* bluegrass
Dave Ferman
* 02/26/99
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
(Copyright 1999)
* The Mountain, Steve Earle's wonderful new CD with the Del McCoury
Band, starts in Texas, with his grandfather dragging him down to a
railyard at dawn to show him the grand old trains before they fade to
memory.
This is perfect scene-setting: Both the tale and the music evoke a
combination of the past and the present, of missing the old days and
trying to hang onto these times as hard as possible, and Earle never
wavers from this feeling of fusing the time-worn and the timeless.
TD The Mountain, as he writes in his liner notes, is a tribute to
the genre's best-known musician (Bill Monroe) and, he says, his own
bid for immortality: "I wanted to write just one song that would be
* performed by at least one band at every bluegrass festival in the
world long after I have followed Mr. Bill out of this world."
* Maybe so, maybe not. Doesn't matter. As a foray into bluegrass,
The Mountain is absolutely on the money. Regardless of whether these
songs will become genre classics, they certainly work here as a
collection, a swirling mix of Texas folk, Celtic melodies, white
* gospel, bluegrass breakdowns, Dust Bowl ballads, love and death and
sad partings.
* Earle working with McCoury's band is the bluegrass equivalent of
having the Rolling Stones as your backup band, but he pulls it off.
And then some. Yes, McCoury's band frames this music brilliantly,
but it never overshadows Earle's touch with lyrics as well as vocals,
both of which have a fine, honest, lived-in quality. Earle is a
relative novice to this music, but he rarely sounds like it.
These tales of miners' woes (the title track), lost love (Yours
Forever Blue) and a homicidal infatuation with a young woman (Carrie
Brown) sound as old as the hills and as craggy as the Appalachians,
as immediate and forceful as anything he's ever done. Save for
annoyingly nasal vocals on I'm Still in Love With You and a so-so
instrumental (Paddy on the Beat), this is a marvelous CD through and
through.
The Del McCoury Band's new CD, The Family, is almost as good.
* McCoury, 69, has been one of the top names in bluegrass for more than
30 years. He has a fantastic grasp on mixing Celtic and blues
* influences into the basic bluegrass sound, an absolutely killer band,
and a strong collection of originals and covers.
