"Timeless" beauty

With her latest album, Martina McBride breathes new life into contemporary country music by summoning ghosts from the past.

By Charles Taylor

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Jan. 11, 2006 | "Ghosts from a beautiful dream." That's how country-and-western star Marty Stuart refers to such living luminaries of country music as Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and others in his liner notes for Martina McBride's latest album, "Timeless." Could any description be more loving? Or more withering?

To describe country music as a place where living greats have become ghosts is to describe it as having betrayed its past, probably the most damning thing you could say about a genre that claims to have such respect for tradition.

I stopped listening to contemporary country music a few years back. I was tired of the anonymity of the songwriting, of arrangements that sounded like some postmodern representation of country instead of music itself. And the music that sprang up in opposition, alt-country, was usually about as much fun as sitting bare-ass naked on a splintery bench. The alt-country artists sounded as if any expression of pleasure was a sellout. If mainstream country had become the equivalent of a shiny new SUV, alt-country was a dirty window with dead flies littering the sill. A choice between that shopping-mall dominatrix Shania Twain or Lucinda Williams' wallflower moping was no choice at all.

What does it say that two of the biggest icons in country, Dolly Parton and George Jones, and country's biggest contemporary female star, Martina McBride, have all turned their backs on contemporary country on their new records? Parton's "Those Were the Days" is a selection of folk-rock covers from the '60s and '70s; George Jones' "Hits I Missed ... And One I Didn't" consists of songs he turned down that became hits for other artists. The Parton and Jones albums aren't played on country radio, but for Martina McBride to release "Timeless," consisting entirely of classic country hits, is, whether she intends it to be or not, a gauntlet thrown at the facelessness of contemporary country. (That "Timeless" entered the country charts at No. 1 -- and that Lee Ann Womack's "There's More Where That Came From," which, from the cover art to the sound of the music, harked back to '70s country, was one of last year's biggest country albums -- suggests that some country fans may be willing to throw down the gauntlet as well.)

Ever since her debut in 1992, Martina McBride has been a perpetual ray of hope in country music. She's never equaled her first big hit, "Independence Day" -- the witness of a true believer delivered as a scorched-earth sermon -- which, after Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," is the greatest single of the '90s. Her choice of material, her arrangements and production, have been as slick as anything mainstream country has to offer. And some of the songs, most notably those on 1997's "Evolution," had a treacly self-actualization subtext (the faux feminism country music adopted as a reaction to what has been so dimwittedly read as the submissiveness of Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man").

Why, then, do I still listen to everything McBride does as soon as she does it? Because she has never once sounded defined by the commercial slickness of her material or musicians, has never seemed to be phoning it in, has never not sounded like a real person. Martina McBride possesses one of the truest voices I know, and while I have often wished for her to travel rougher territory, I have never doubted her sincerity or integrity.

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