(Dualtone Music)
Go ahead and call it hootenanny music. It consists of banjo-pickin', fiddle-strummin', cowboy hat-sportin' good ole boys talking about innocent love and the birds in spring. It's plain, unadorned and seems out of place on a compact disk. Yet , by Jim Lauderdale and Ralph Stanley with the Clinch Mountain Boys manages to get some heads nodding and, on the faster-paced tracks, some knees slapped.
The album is filled with backwoods wisdom and sunlit imagery. It exists in that rustic place that is not mentioned with an exit sign on the interstate. Most maps would hesitate to place where exactly it comes from because resides not so much in a place but in a time. It exists where time doesn't feel inclined to always move forward and the pavement doesn't mark progress.
The album is a welcome antidote to the current state of country. There are actually people who are less than attractive on it. The amount of wrinkles in Ralph Stanley's face totals more than the cumulative of all that the current top 10 country artists will ever have. This bluegrass-heavy album carries with it style instead of image, preferring to let the voices and instruments speak instead of some pretty face on the cover. Where today's sappy pop-country delights in putting made-up beauties with emphasis on their lips than on their words, Lauderdale and Stanley remember that clever lyrics and quick humor make a good Americana roots album.
On the third to last track, in true tongue-in-cheek smugness, the guys each chip in, singing, \We hope you have enjoyed our portion of the show/ We'll do another song or two before we have to go/ I'll point out to the fellows what I can clearly see ... ."" Then Lauderdale, Stanley and Ralph Stanley II each put forth, ""She's lookin' at me."" By the end of the track, the three break down to give a talking argument where each claims the unnamed woman's attention. There's something undeniably charming about hearing the elder Stanley call himself an old rat in the barn and thinking that some lady in the crowd is catching his eye.
While Lauderdale's pleasant words keep the album kind-hearted but honest, it is Ralph Stanley who gives each song that edge of erosion in age that they require. Stanley, who achieved fame with ""O Death"" on the ""O Brother, Where Art Thou?"" soundtrack, brings the weathered depth of a shrewd old man from the backwoods to . He could mumble, but instead he just turns a wind-swept grin into a dusty voice. The last track ""Listen to the Shepherd,"" lets him give an old man's cry to the world. It combines a bit of rust with a whole lot of wisdom.
is a catalogue of rural music before the dirt roads were taken over by NASCAR fans and industrial agriculture. It's fanciful and even nostalgic, but it's still good music that makes a person wish for yokels with banjoes instead of shotguns. In ""Deep Well of Sadness"" Lauderdale laments, ""I thought I caught the first snowflake of winter/ Upon my tongue, my wicked thirsty slate/ I thought I heard a voice that bid me enter/ That learned me how to give more than I can take."" It's the quaint teachings and the pastoral scenes like this that make such a treat, one to be enjoyed on a back porch in the summer breeze.
