NYT
March 7, 1999
Chroniclers of Wayward Souls
By ANN POWERS
Country has long been packaged as the classical music of
simple
American folks. The transformation of hillbilly
entertainment into
an official repository of our national traditions has
extended from
the fancy naming of the Grand Ole Opry in 1927 to the
appointment of
William Ivey, the director of the Country Music Hall of
Fame, to the chair
of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998.
Not only Nashville's music
industry, but also the
"alternative" country made
by rock- and folk-schooled
rebels can be discouragingly
orthodox, its vintage
trappings turning cultural
preservation into historical
tourism.
Yet country music is also
grounded in dislocation -- in
the stories of people facing
upheaval in their home
towns, their families, their
daily life. This is a modern
music, tied like the blues to
the journeys of working
people across America and
the encroachment of the city
on rural life.
The poor wayfaring stranger is as much a honky-tonk cliche
as Mama
making cornbread, and as country's patina grows ever more
nostalgic, even
that character's vagrancy becomes strangely fixed. Exile has
become
another form of home in country, invoked with a warm glow.
Country music finds its power in the tension between
nostalgia and the
need for change, a contradiction mined on two new albums by
established
iconoclasts. "The Mountain," by Steve Earle with the Del
McCoury Band,
investigates country's most classical form, bluegrass. "What
I Deserve," by
Kelly Willis, is more eclectic. Both Earle and Ms. Willis
succeed where
many of their contemporaries fail by keeping their focus on
restlessness.
"The Mountain" (E Squared, CD, CD 1063-2) is an art project
in denim
and work boots, a self-conscious effort by Earle to pay
homage to the
bluegrass pantheon if not enter it.
"My primary motive in writing these songs was both selfish
and ambitious
-- immortality," he writes in the album's liner notes, and
on some songs he
has achieved an almost eerie timelessness. It's hard to
believe that the
murder ballad "Carrie Brown" or the funeral hymn "Pilgrim"
hasn't been
sung by anonymous town criers for a century, but it's also
easy to forget
that the plaintive form of "country jazz" that Earle is
reproducing emerged
a mere half century ago.
Working with the virtuoso ensemble the Del McCoury Band,
Earle
matches venerable themes of heartbreak and war, workingman's
struggles
and outlaw romance to his casually expert compositions. His
patented
rocker's snarl meshes with Del McCoury's unearthly wail to
form a link
across the generations of country renegades.
The album's musicianship is notable; its guest roster
features many of
bluegrass' finest players plus the alternative-country stars
Emmylou Harris,
Gillian Welch and Iris DeMent. But Earle's songs make "The
Mountain"
more than a fine generic exercise as they trace a path of
displacement
throughout American history.
Earle has often chronicled the violence of modernization;
his early forays
into country-rock updated that theme with a Southernized
Springsteen
sound and a countercultural attitude. Like those early
albums, "The
Mountain" uses its musical focus to further a strong social
agenda.
Earle seeks a common voice grounded not in wistful memory
but in
thorny reality; his ramblers are the former high school
football heroes,
drug dealers, gas station attendants and homeless people of
the New South.
"The Mountain" finds counterparts for those characters in
Civil War tales
and corny love songs.
The album begins with "Texas Eagle," an ode to trains made
unsentimental by its acknowledgment of the American rail
system's
economic woes. It moves through Irish immigration and the
Depression's
Dust Bowl before settling in heaven's waiting room with
"Pilgrim." There
is nothing but motion on "The Mountain," nothing but anxious
progress.
Earle drives this point home with the album's title track,
in which the
miner who declared his undying pride of place in "Harlan
Man" finds his
beloved mountain ravaged and himself devastated by the march
of
industrial capitalism.
In Earle's ruthless vision, those who stand fast against
cruel change can
only hope for obsolescence. By setting his anthology of
wandering to the
lonesome tones of bluegrass, Earle disturbs the complacent
aura that can
sometimes overwhelm country classicism.
Kelly Willis challenges a different set of rules with "What
I Deserve," her
new album for the independent label Rykodisc (CD, RCD
10458). Ms.
Willis made three albums for MCA Nashville in the early
1990s and had
modest success, but she never fit into the industry machine.
Living in
Austin, Texas, she allied herself with the line of
singer-songwriters that
travels between country, folk, and rock.
Free to explore fully the place where those poles meet, Ms.
Willis has
emerged with a rich representation of the unsettled life. It
begins, like so
many in pop, with a bad love affair. "Take Me Down," written
with Gary
Louris of the Jayhawks, is a sweet swoon of co-dependency;
the title track,
also written with Louris, chronicles a more complicated
crisis.
Set to a loping beat knocked off-kilter by Chuck Prophet's
phase-shifted
guitar, "What I Deserve" is the confused lament of an
ambitious woman.
Refusing to take solace in prayer, the beauty of nature or
any other
old-fashioned balm, Ms. Willis lambastes herself for never
slowing down
and the world for suggesting that she should.
This particularly feminine, very current perspective on
emotional
ambivalence enriches "What I Deserve." Ms. Willis has a
honey-lemon
voice that can be as soothing as a lozenge, and it works
that way on a
lullabye like Paul Kelly's "Cradle of Love," but she mostly
she uses it in
the service of more wayward desires.
She offers painful tales of lost love but then expresses the
resolve to move
on. Hovering between romantic fantasy and deflated realism,
Ms. Willis
taps a rare subtlety of feeling.
"What I Deserve" often returns to the subject of
contentment, something
Ms. Willis doesn't pretend to grasp fully. "If I ran so far
that my life can't
follow me, would it keep the world from up and swallowing
me?" she
sings in "Fading Fast"; with such a phrase, she makes the
saga of the
wayfaring stranger internal and completely contemporary.
Like Earle, Ms. Willis knows that the itinerant world is no
paradise, but
she's not willing to pretend that there's any other place
like home, even for
a simple country girl.
