David Hill

Good thing. Jackson, who was discovered in Oklahoma City by honky-tonker Hank Thompson, has always been a great country singer, but it’s her rock numbers that endure, even if they didn’t sell particularly well back in the 1950s. America, apparently, wasn’t quite ready for a female version of Elvis (whom she toured with in ’55 and ’56). “Wanda Jackson,” writes Colin Escott in his liner notes to Rhino’s recent box set “Loud, Fast, & Out of Control: The Wild Sounds of ’50s Rock” (which contains two of her songs), “insists she really wasn’t that kind of girl, but while other women singers were simpering about where the boys are, Wanda always sang as if they were in her hotel room.” “Let’s Have a Party,” which Elvis had recorded for his 1957 film “Loving You,” was Jackson’s breakthrough to the pop charts in 1960, but by then she was well on her way to giving up on rock and returning to her country roots.

At Saturday’s LoDo Music Festival in downtown Denver, Jackson was introduced as the “Queen of Rockabilly,” and she easily lived up to the billing. “I think I’m where it’s happenin’ tonight!” she bragged, much to the delight of the small, reverent crowd. Backed by the Cadillac Angels, a three-piece combo from Santa Barbara, Calif., Jackson played an hour-long set that emphasized her pioneering, female-centric rock ‘n’ roll.

Dressed in a satiny, all-white pants suit, her jet-black hair perfectly coifed, Jackson growled her way through “Riot in Cell Block #9,” the Jerry Leiber-Mike Stoller song, originally recorded by the Robins but brilliantly recast by Jackson in 1960. “Here’s another song just for the girls,” she said before launching into the sassy “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad.” (“Well, the moral is to play it cool/Let your guy know, you’re nobody’s fool/When he gets to thinkin’ you’re all his own/ Let him know that you can take him, or leave him alone.”) The song, she said, “almost got me in trouble, but I said, ‘The heck with it!’”

On “Fujiyama Mama,” she whooped and hollered with wild abandon, while a group of adoring female fans sang along. “I think it’s so neat that you gals know all the words to that one,” she said in her thick Oklahoma twang. By the time Jackson professed her devotion to Jesus (“My life changed in 1971, when Jesus came into my life”) as an introduction to Hank Williams’ “I Saw the Light,” the crowd had begun to thin. But those who remained were treated to a blazing “Let’s Have a Party,” followed by the Jerry Lee Lewis classic “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Never a hit for Jackson, it was nonetheless an appropriate song for her to end the show with, for Jackson and Lewis are musical — and spiritual — soulmates, deeply religious singers torn between sexuality and salvation, between Saturday night and Sunday morning. In other words: true, honest-to-god, Southern born-and-bred rock ‘n’ rollers.

Guthrie, himself an Okie, was living in New York when his friend Alan Lomax, the folklorist, persuaded RCA to produce a 12-song, two-volume collection of the folk singer’s Dust Bowl songs. The label liked the idea and arranged for Guthrie to take the train down to Camden. “I don’t usually write ballads to order,” Guthrie told Pete Seeger, “but Victor wants me to do a whole album of Dust Bowl songs, and they say they want one about Tom Joad in ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’” Guthrie meant John Ford’s movie version, not John Steinbeck’s book, which had been published in 1939. (He claimed not to have read it.) Guthrie went to see the picture one evening, then he stayed up all night swigging from a jug of wine and writing “Tom Joad.” Sung to the tune of “John Hardy,” an outlaw ballad, he finished a trenchant, six-minute summary of Ford’s movie. “Wherever little children are hungry and cry,” Guthrie sings in his rough, twangy voice, paraphrasing Henry Fonda’s famous lines, “Wherever people ain’t free/Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights/That’s where I’m a-gonna be, Ma/That’s where I’m a-gonna be.”

The other songs are just as powerful. There’s “The Great Dust Storm (Dust Storm Disaster),” the opening number, about the defining moment of the Dust Bowl, when a black wall of dust blew across the plains. It was an event Guthrie witnessed while living in Pampa, Texas. There’s “Pretty Boy Floyd,” about the famous bank robber, recast by Guthrie as a Depression-era Robin Hood who leaves $1,000 bills under the napkins of starving farmers. There’s “Dust Bowl Blues,” Guthrie’s take on a Jimmie Rodgers-style country blues melody. There’s “Vigilante Man,” an eerie portrait of the goons who terrorized the migrant farmers searching for work. (“Tell me what is a vigilante man?/Has he got a gun and a club in his hand?/Is that a vigilante man?”) There’s “Do Re Mi,” one of Guthrie’s most famous songs, a lighthearted reality check for the poor souls dreaming of milk and honey as they headed for California, the Promised Land. On all of them, Guthrie plays guitar — perhaps it was the one with “This Machine Kills Fascists” scrawled on it — and harmonica. The sound is spare, the aural equivalent of Dorothea Lange’s famous black-and-white photographs of poor migrant families.

“Dust Bowl Ballads” didn’t cause much of a stir when it was released, though some reviews were favorable. One writer in particular, Howard Taubman of the New York Times, seemed to understand what Guthrie was trying to achieve with his music: “These albums are not a summer sedative. They make you think; they may even make you uncomfortable.” But as Guthrie became more famous, so did “Dust Bowl Ballads.” By the time it was reissued in 1950, it was widely considered a landmark recording. In the 1960s, it served as a musical road map for folkies like Bob Dylan and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. More recently, Bruce Springsteen fell under its powerful sway, particularly on “Nebraska” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”

“This Land Is Your Land” may be Guthrie’s most famous song, but “Dust Bowl Ballads” is his masterpiece, an American classic that deserves to be placed alongside “Huckleberry Finn,” Elvis Presley’s Sun sessions or, for that matter, both versions of “The Grapes of Wrath.” It’s that good.

Rounder Records released “Dust Bowl Ballads” as a CD in 1988, but that version has been out of print for several years. Buddha Records has brought it back. The latest reissue contains just one previously unreleased song — an alternate version of “Talking Dust Bowl Blues” — but the sound is far superior to Rounder’s disc, so much better, in fact, that it renders that earlier CD obsolete. Buddha also had the good sense to restore Guthrie’s wonderful liner notes. They were, as usual, characteristically understated and humble. “This bunch of songs are really just one song, ’cause I used the same notes,” he wrote. “Just fixed ‘em a little different, that’s all. Same old notes as ever.”

Sahm would go on to form the Sir Douglas Quintet — the name was a producer’s ploy to pass the band off as British Invaders — recording such ’60s AM radio classics as “She’s About a Mover” and “Mendocino.” Signed to Atlantic Records in 1973 by Jerry Wexler, he recorded two fine (but poor-selling) albums for the label, “Doug Sahm and Friends” and “Texas Tornado.” Tall and lean, with long blond hair, mutton-chop sideburns and granny glasses, he was the original hippie cowboy, a Lone Star hipster who palled around with Dylan and Janis and the Grateful Dead.

Sahm’s subsequent work was all over the map, as sprawling as the wide-open Texas landscape. In his adopted hometown of Austin, Sahm was a legend, the patron saint of Texas music. When he died, the Austin Chronicle put Sahm on the cover and dubbed him the “State Musician of Texas.”

For what would turn out to be his last record, Sahm went back to his country roots, recording a superb collection of songs with a crack band, including son Shawn on background vocals, longtime cohort Augie Meyers on organ, Bill Kirchen on electric guitar, Tommy Detamore on steel guitar and Bobby Flores on fiddle. (The latter two, in particular, are featured prominently.) You won’t be hearing any of it on country radio, though. “The Return of Wayne Douglas” — the title comes from one of the aliases Sahm used when he played country gigs around Austin — is as fresh as a just-opened, ice-cold bottle of Shiner Bock, but its sound is closer in spirit to Buck Owens than, say, Tim McGraw. “I’m a real country fan, son,” he sings in “Oh No, Not Another One,” a stinging critique of current C&W fare. “When country changed to pop, they had a laugh/As the real country fans got the shaft.” “The Return of Wayne Douglas” is for country fans who like their music hard.

Naturally, the album’s 12 songs are mostly about love: the love of women and the love of Texas. In “Cowboy Peyton Place,” Sahm walks into a bar for a beer and winds up falling in love “with the steel guitar player’s wife.” Soap opera ensues. In “I Can’t Go Back to Austin,” a lover’s boyfriend threatens to punch him out if he shows his face around town. “Huggin’ Thin Air” finds Sahm doing just that as he wakes up in the morning to find his lover has up and gone.

In “Beautiful Texas Sunshine,” a standout track that features some excellent pedal steel work by Detamore, Sahm muses on the joys of hanging out and doing nothing — and then moving on. “Texas Me,” which closes the album, is an ode to Sahm’s beloved state, written in California more than 30 years ago during a bout of homesickness. “I wonder what happened to that man inside,” Sahm moans in his soulful, gravelly voice, “the real old Texas me.”

Two covers — Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” and Leon Payne’s “They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me” — demonstrate that Sahm was just as good singing other people’s songs as he was singing his own. Too bad he never recorded an all-Dylan album; it would have been great.

At the end of “They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me,” Sahm tells a little story about the time he and his daddy visited Payne, who was known as “The Blind Balladeer,” at his home in Bandera, Texas. Little Doug was amazed at how easily Payne could get around inside his house without stumbling. “It just blew my mind,” he says. “And my daddy told me that some people, they’ve got this inner sight. They just can feel and see things that other people can’t see.”

Doug Sahm had a similar gift. The songs on “The Return of Wayne Douglas” may be about earthly matters, but Sahm infuses them lots of Texas soul, elevating them to heavenly heights. Sahm’s final recording is one of his best, a fitting end to the brilliant career of a true American original.

When you consider that Earle, 45, defines transcendence as “being still enough long enough to know when it’s time to move on,” his ramblin’ ways seem inevitable. The boy can’t help it. Born in Virginia but raised in Texas, Earle made a big splash in 1986 with “Guitar Town,” his acclaimed debut album. “The hillbilly Bruce Springsteen,” he was called, not altogether inaccurately. His early albums were more rock than country, and his gritty songs, mostly about rebels and outcasts, had some of the same anthemic quality as “Born to Run”-era Springsteen.

In 1990, however, when his fourth album, “The Hard Way,” failed to sell, the good times came to a crashing halt. Dropped by his label, Earle descended into four years of cocaine and heroin addiction, funded by a steady stream of royalty checks. In 1994, he was busted for buying a tenth of a gram of heroin and spent a month in rehab. The treatment worked, and so began the second coming of Steve Earle. The singer-songwriter has produced one stellar disc after another: the roots-rockish “I Feel Alright,” the eclectic “El Corazsn” and the bluegrass-oriented “The Mountain” (recorded with the Del McCoury Band). “Transcendental Blues” continues the string.

Bob Dylan had a similar run in the mid-1960s, starting with “Bringing It All Back Home.” So, of course, did the Beatles. But in today’s world of disposable pop music, such an achievement is practically unheard of. On “Train a Comin’,” Earle recorded a great hillbilly version of Lennon-McCartney’s “I’m Looking Through You.” (“This is the stuff I cut my teeth on,” he wrote in the liner notes. “Middle Class White Boy Roots Music.”) This time around, he forgoes any covers, but the influence of “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” is obvious on “Transcendental Blues.” Earle even plays a synthesizer on the title cut and tacks a strange little reprise onto the end of “Everyone’s in Love With You,” ` la “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

He doesn’t push the psychedelia too far, though. Earle and his band, the Dukes (guitarist David Steele, bassist Kelley Looney and drummer Will Rigby), along with assorted guest musicians, mix things up, dipping into Dylanesque folk rock (“Another Town”), Irish string-band music (“The Galway Girl”), bluegrass (“Until the Day I Die”) and flat-out rock ‘n’ roll (“All of My Life”). “I have spent most of my life (like most people) avoiding transcendence at all costs,” Earle writes in the liner notes, “mainly because the shit hurts.”

And it’s true: “Transcendental Blues” is a deeply personal album steeped in pain and loneliness. Nearly every song contains the word “lonesome,” “alone” or “lonely.” One is even titled “Lonelier Than This.” (“It doesn’t get any lonelier than this/I believe my heart’ll break/Tonight I prayed I’d die before I wake.”) “Wherever I Go” finds Earle “all alone,” with “a hurtin’ deep down in my soul.” Rejected, dejected, he promises to move on to another town, with his past behind him and his future bright. At the same time, he’s “thinkin’ ’bout givin’ up this ramblin’ ’round/Hangin’ up my highway shoes/Lately when I walk they make a hollow sound” (“Steve’s Last Ramble”). He longs for someone to ease the pain, to make life bearable, to catch him when he falls.

To keep things in perspective, Earle ends the album with the poignant “Over Yonder (Jonathan’s Song),” inspired, no doubt, by his experience as a witness to the execution of Jonathan Nobles, a convicted murderer who spent 12 years on death row in a Huntsville, Texas, prison. Earle, a passionate death penalty opponent, refrains from preaching, focusing instead on the prisoner’s thoughts as he prepares to die: “I am going up over yonder/Where no ghost can follow me/There’s another place beyond here/Where I’ll be free, I believe.” If a soon-to-die convict can be at peace with himself, Earle seems to be saying, so can I.

Unlike Merle Haggard, who served time in San Quentin State Prison for armed robbery, Cash, even in his hard-livin’, motel-trashin’ younger days, was never more than a small-time offender. According to Nicholas Dawidoff’s authoritative “In the Country of Country,” Cash was jailed on seven different occasions, each time for just one night. Once, he got thrown in the slammer in El Paso, Texas, after trying to smuggle amphetamines across the border from Mexico. (Cash’s early self-destructive habits are legendary and well-documented.)

But Cash is no murderer. Still, he has always identified with those who step outside of the law, and he has probably recorded more murder songs than just about any other singer alive — and that includes Tupac. Sixteen of them, including “Folsom Prison Blues,” can be found on the third CD of “Love God Murder,” a three-disc set of songs selected by the Man in Black himself. (Each disc is also available separately.)

With liner notes written by Cash, his wife June Carter Cash, U2′s Bono and, oddly enough, director Quentin Tarantino, the collection is surely intended to further cement Cash’s reputation as an American musical legend. (As if that’s necessary.) Trouble is, Cash’s long recording career has nearly as many peaks and valleys as Elvis Presley’s. “Love God Murder” contains some of Cash’s best (and best-known) songs, but it also includes too many forgettable ones.

“Murder,” for instance, kicks off (naturally) with “Folsom Prison,” followed by the chilling “Delia’s Gone,” from his acclaimed 1994 comeback album “American Recordings.” The two songs are joined at the hip. Cash, practically bragging about his bloody deed, sings, “First time I shot her/I shot her in the side/Hard to watch her suffer/But with the second shot she died/Delia’s gone, one more round, Delia’s gone.”

Those songs are hard to follow. By comparison, “Mister Garfield,” from 1965, and “When It’s Springtime in Alaska,” from 1964, are garden-variety murder ballads. Only when Cash sings in the first person — as he does on “Cocaine Blues,” “The Long Black Veil” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman” — does he approach the brilliance of “Folsom” and “Delia.”

“God,” which contains 16 of Cash’s sacred songs, holds up better. One standout is “Belshazzar,” a revved-up rockabilly number from 1957 that Cash sang when he first auditioned for Phillips at Sun Records. (Cash pitched himself as a gospel singer, but Phillips convinced him to stick to secular material.) After Cash moved to Columbia Records in 1958, his producer, Don Law, allowed him to record “Hymns by Johnny Cash,” his second album for the label. “God” features three great songs from that effort: “It Was Jesus (Who Was It?),” “The Old Account” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” Unfortunately, “God” contains a few numbers that never should have been resurrected, particularly “The Greatest Cowboy of All.” That would be Jesus, who, according to Cash, “loves all his little dogies/He speaks to them kind and gently/And he’ll lift up any maverick who falls.” Yee-haw!

“Love” is the standout disc of this collection. (It’s the one to buy if you don’t want the entire anthology.) To understand why, read Cash’s revealing liner notes. “I remember when I fell into June’s ‘Ring of Fire,’” he writes. “There was a lot of showing it as well as saying it. Never has there been a deeper love than my love for her. At times it was painful, but we shared the pain, so it was just half painful. Now, even though it [has] mellowed out, the flame of our love still burns, and it burns, burns, burns.”

The song, of course, is “Ring of Fire,” which June Carter wrote in the early 1960s after falling hard for Cash. “I felt like I was falling into a pit of fire and I was literally burning alive,” she has said. That’s a recipe for great love songs, and “Ring of Fire” is one of them. It’s here, of course, along with “I Walk The Line,” “All Over Again” and “I Still Miss Someone.” But many of the selections are little-known gems, like “A Little at a Time” (1962), in which a heartbroken Cash moans, “Hurt me, a little at a time/Turn me away, a little at a time/Walk away slow like you don’t want to go/Leave me, a little at a time.” Then there’s “Happiness Is You” (1965), a simple ode to the love of his life: “No more chasing moonbeams or catching falling stars,” he sings with contentment. “I know now my pot of gold is anywhere you are.”

Cash is now 68 and suffering from Shy-Drager Syndrome, a rare degenerative neurological disorder. Naturally, that adds a certain poignancy to “Love God Murder.” Is this Cash’s swan song? Don’t bet on it. Lately, he’s been recording a new batch of songs for a third Rick Rubin-produced album, to be released sometime later this year. He may even play a few shows here and there. It’s a touching footnote to a blessed career. As Cash muses in the notes, “God likes a Southern accent and He tolerates country music and quite a bit of guitar.”

For his strong debut solo album, “Madeline” (HighTone), Weeks hasn’t entirely abandoned his country roots, but he has added a healthy dose of soul and blues to the mix, with help from guitarist Tony Gilkyson (X, Lone Justice) and organist Skip Edwards (Dwight Yoakam). If Robbie Fulks and Tony Joe White (“Polk Salad Annie”) were somehow merged into one person, Weeks might be the result. He has the boyish, nasally voice of the former and the soulful attitude of the latter. An odd combination, perhaps, but it works.

Together, the 12 songs on “Madeline” — Weeks wrote nearly all of them — paint a dark, sometimes disturbing image of love gone bad. It may the best breakup album since Chris Isaak’s “Forever Blue.”

“Motor City,” the opening cut, with its driving, garage-band groove, finds the singer holed up in the bitter cold of Detroit, making plans to “take a little trip out West” to get over a soured romance. “Can’t Let Go,” which Lucinda Williams recorded on her “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” album, makes it painfully clear just how hard that is to do.

In “Baby You Got to Choose,” Weeks pleads for lost affection: “I’m comin’ through your kitchen door/I’ll bring you biscuits baby, and so much more/First you got to choose/I want to show my good side to you.” When that fails, he takes a more direct approach. “I’m gonna tear your dress,” Weeks sings in a creepy monotone on the title track. “I’m gonna leave you with your hair a mess … I’m gonna muscle in/To all your hidin’ places/When I can.” It’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You” with twang.

Like Gram Parsons, Weeks has a thin, wobbly voice that at first listening seems utterly incapable of conveying the pain and emotion of his songs. But its very imperfection turns out to be its strength — think of Bob Dylan, say, or Howlin’ Wolf — and it’s the reason why long after the “Madeline” disc is back in the jewel case, the songs just keep playing.