Anyway, there’s a bigger issue, which is that country music, like jazz, pretty much ran its course years ago. These days, a working country artist can either move the genre forward into unrecognizability–the course Nashville has chosen–or backward into revivalism, which is what such retrosmarties as Gillian Welch or Jim Lauderdale or Dale Watson are up to. If you have any sense, of course, that’s the stuff you’d choose to listen to–but then why wouldn’t you just kick back with the Harry Smith anthology, the Stanley Brothers and your old Hank, Lefty, Buck and Merle records? Sure, the nth bluegrass revival since the 1960s is still going on, but while the general level of competence has gone through the roof, the funk quotient is sinking like that old evening sun. And we’ve still got such country-based originals as Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams and such alt-country good new boys as Ryan Adams. But as satisfying as they can be, they have a meta-Americana feel, as if they can’t quite lose their consciousness of how cool it is to be a country-based original. For anybody who still believes in plain-old country music, oy is not too strong a word.
Still, I can’t get a couple of new country CDs out of my system. Pun intended. Buddy Miller’s “Midnight and Lonesome,” his fourth solo album, shows that the old fusion of country and rock can still yield some freaky energy. You may know Miller from his guitar-playing and harmony singing with Emmylou Harris; the guitar textures on “Midnight and Lonesome,” from the warm acoustic on Percy Mayfield’s classic “Please Send Me Someone to Love” to the electric dirt and grit on “Little Bitty Kiss” should scratch the most discriminating itches.
And he’s chosen his collaborators well: Larry Campbell from Bob Dylan’s band on fiddle and steel guitar, Harris singing sweet-and-tart harmony on Jesse Winchester’s mournful “A Showman’s Life” and Lee Ann Womack doing the same on “I Can’t Get Over You,” a gratifying wallow in heartache written by Miller and his wife, Julie. Elsewhere, both Millers harmonize; Julie’s thin, twisty, anguished voice ideally complements Buddy’s rough-edged delivery on Don and Phil Everly’s rocking “The Price of Love” and the Millers’ own stark “Quecreek,” a mine-disaster ballad which morphs into a gospel altar call. With the smart song choices–best line: “You can stick a feather in my cap and call it matrimony,” by the Millers and co-writer Lauderdale–smarter arrangements, and sheer taste, Miller manages to get the best out of his generic hard-country voice. You can listen to “Midnight and Lonesome” a lot of times with a lot of pleasure before you even start to suspect there’s nobody in particular there.
Justin Trevino, a retro-honkytonker from Austin, Texas, is the country equivalent of an M.F.A. He’s been mentored by fellow Texans Johnny Bush (who wrote “Whiskey River” for Willie Nelson) and the nonpareil yodeler Don Walser, both of whom have hired him as a sideman, and done pickup gigs with such old-school country legends as Kitty Wells, Hank Thompson and Floyd Tillman. “The Scene of the Crying,” his second album for Austin-based Lone Star Records, kicks off with the undeservedly obscure 1965 song “Two Empty Glasses,” set to a classic Ray Price shuffle beat, with walking bass, twin fiddles and welling steel guitar. Midway through, it unearths an unrecorded song (“Rest of My Years”) by Donny Young, whom you know as Johnny Paycheck, and it ends with Mel Tillis’s woefully witty “Old Faithful.”
It also includes old numbers recorded by Connie Smith, George Jones and Ernest Tubb, and even the newly written title song (by steel guitarist Dickey Overbey) sounds as if it came out in about 1965–and not just because of the strained pun. Purist country fans will treasure the record if only for Trevino’s covers of “What Have We Done,” a 1966 hit for rockabilly pioneer Wanda Jackson, and “Daydreaming,” a hit in 1954 for the Cajun crossover star Jimmy C. Newman–each guest-starring the original artist in splendid voice. (After hearing Newman, who now sounds like a slightly more uptown Ralph Stanley, you may want everything he ever recorded.) Trevino himself sounds as much like Price as anybody: a powerful, high-pitched voice, deceptively smooth but with a piercing edge. If you’re going to sound like somebody, you could do a lot worse. Almost everybody does.
I could close this review with some boilerplate lament for distinctive individual voices: how back in the day even middling country singers (the Carl Smiths, the Faron Youngs, the Jean Shepherds) sounded like themselves and no one else. Where are the Hank Snows of yesteryear? But I think I’ll skip that, too. We know what kind of a culture we’re in now. (Today’s equivalent of one-namers like Hank and Lefty is Shania.) We’re damn lucky to have any new country music fit to listen to. So why not shut up and do it?
