A gifted singer and songwriter from rural Alabama, Shelby Lynne was barely out of her teens when, in 1987, she was discovered on the Nashville Network’s “Nashville Now” program. Touted as the Next Big Thang, Lynne signed a deal with Epic, where she recorded a duet with George Jones, “If I Could Bottle This Up.” Her three albums for the label earned decent reviews and produced a few singles, but Lynne never hit it big, and she grew tired of Nashville’s rigid approach to music making. Picked up by the now-defunct Morgan Creek label, Lynne explored Western swing and jazz on “Temptation” (1993). Switching to another independent, Magnatone, in 1995, she recorded “Restless,” a critical favorite that disappeared without a trace. It seemed entirely possible that Lynne might do the same thing: You can’t even buy her albums these days — sadly, they’re all out of print.
Now comes “I Am Shelby Lynne,” a soulful collection of heart-rending pop songs that owes more to Dusty Springfield than Patsy Cline. As the title suggests, this is supposed to be the real Shelby Lynne, the country girl from Alabama with the smoky, sultry voice, not the slicked-up Nashville singer who played by the rules but got run out of town by the men in suits. “I’m leavin’,” she sings, “this time it’s for good/You should have treated me/The way you said you would.” The song is about saying goodbye to a lover, but it might as well be Lynne’s farewell to Music City, USA.
Although she recorded the album in California, Lynne, just 31 years old, seems to have taken up residency in Tennessee’s other musical hotbed, Memphis. “Your Lies,” which kicks off the album with sweeping violins and a driving electric guitar, sounds like an outtake from “Dusty in Memphis.” The cool, funky “Thought It Would Be Easier” evokes the Willie Mitchell-era Al Green. “Why Can’t You Be?” employs a Memphis-style horn section. Lynne’s voice — an engaging blend of soul and country — is custom made for this kind of material.
So why doesn’t “I Am” quite hit the mark? Blame it on producer Bill Bottrell, best-known for his work with Sheryl Crow. Simply put, he lays it on a little too thick. On “Your Lies,” for instance, Lynne’s voice gets trapped behind a Phil Spectorish wall of sound. (You can bet Jerry Wexler never would have done that to Springfield.) The same thing happens on the heavily orchestrated “Gotta Get Back.” A repetitive riff on a 12-string guitar nearly drowns out Lynne’s vocals, about the anticipation of being reunited with the man she loves. (“I can almost touch you now/Flying above the clouds in a big ol’ plane/I can’t wait to hold you and see you again/Tell you where I’ve been.”)
On several songs, Bottrell’s arrangements appear to be lifted directly from his favorite records of the 1960s. For instance, you can’t listen to “Dream Some” without thinking of, say, Dionne Warwick singing Burt Bacharach’s “Walk on By.” (Bottrell even throws in a cheesy flute solo for good measure.) Why not just call the album “I Am Bill Bottrell”?
A few songs, though, hint at what could have been. On “Where I’m From,” Bottrell lets Shelby be Shelby, and the result is a wonderful ode to Lynne’s Alabama home. “Crickets spreadin’ rumors by the shoreline,” she sings in a dreamy twang, accompanied by bass, guitar and strings. “With the lonesome lady whine/Crab trap full of nothin’/I’m high as the tide, all the tide … All I’m tryin’ to say is/I’m never far away from/Alabama frame of mind.” The sad, lonely “Lookin’ Up,” with it’s simple arrangement and poignant lyrics, is one the album’s highlights. “Walkin’ and cryin’/Stumble into a church,” Lynne sings softly, in a wise-beyond-her-years voice. “Starin’ at the rafters/Wonderin’ how much more I can hurt/Hey old man, what are your plans for me?/Where am I bound?/I’m lookin’ up for the next thing that brings me down.”
“I Am Shelby Lynne” feels like a fresh start from someone who’s been burned too many times before. You can’t help but admire her for making such a dramatic departure from previous work. Still, it’s not the breakthrough album she deserves. Maybe next time she’ll get it right.
Don’t let the title mislead you. “The Very Best of Robbie Fulks” contains none of the quirky songs that have made the Chicago singer-songwriter an alt-country favorite. You won’t find “She Took a Lot of Pills (And Died),” from his acclaimed debut album, “Country Love Songs.” Also missing is “Fuck This Town,” Fulks’ bitter (but hilarious) account of his three-year stint churning out “dumb-ass” mainstream country pablum for a Nashville publishing company, one of the highlights of his second album, “South Mouth.” (None of his Nashville songs, it should be noted, were ever recorded.) And there’s nothing from “Let’s Kill Saturday Night,” Fulks’ major-label debut.
Instead, Fulks’ latest is an odd assortment of singles, live recordings, soundtrack music and other obscurities. It’s a hodge-podge collection, and the results are less than satisfying.
Not that it doesn’t contain a few gems. “Jean Arthur,” from 1992, shows how gifted a songwriter — and a tunesmith — Fulks is. With twangy guitars and a rolling beat, it’s a countryish ode to the Hollywood screen star. “Her talent was not the kind/Learned at some school for actors,” Fulks sings in his thin, reedy voice. “Her beauty might stump the minds/Of all the experts at Max Factor.” Similarly, in “That Bangle Girl,” three minutes of pop perfection, Fulks waxes poetic about Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles, the 1980s girl group: “I like the Bangle girl/She’s too groovy/I love the way she sings/And I’ve seen her movie.” Marshall Crenshaw wishes he wrote this one.
But on too many songs, Fulks just tries too hard, and the effort shows. “Sleepin’ on the Job of Love” sounds like a rewrite of George Jones’ 1965 hit “Love Bug.” “May the Best Man Win,” about a husband who loses his wife to his best friend (“So may the best man win/And may he wind up crying/ May he suffer for life/All her cheating and lying”), is a Harlan Howard knockoff, but without the master’s touch.
“Parallel Bars,” a duet with the sweet-voiced Kelly Willis, offers a novel conceit: Two lovers have a fight and retreat to separate watering holes to hit the bottle and forget their troubles, only to make up later. (“Parallel bars, one at my feet/One on the opposite side of the street/We’re two hearts that just can’t meet/After the heartache’s gone.”) The idea, however, is better than the resulting song, which is too clever for its own good.
Other songs are just plain odd. “Wedding of the Bugs,” a live track from 1998, is about … a bug wedding. “Gravid and Tense,” from the soundtrack to a film titled “Jell-oh Lady,” is a moody, percussive instrumental lasting all of 29 seconds. The cleverly titled “White Man’s Bourbon” turns out to be a crude account of a liquor-induced sexual conquest of a “Zulu maid.” (“She was wild as a boar, she was pussy galore/She was tender as a little pup/Yeah, we fucked and we fucked for a full 12 hours/And she was only warming up.”) In the liner notes, Fulks defends the song as being in the tradition of such songs as “Ubangi Stomp,” “Pickaninnies’ Paradise,” “Geisha Girl” and “Brown Sugar.” “This modest contribution to the canon of amour exotique,” he writes, “fell afoul of a few sensitive souls at the [recording] session who, after huffily demanding and horrifiedly perusing a lyric sheet, objected to being publicly associated with such a thing on the grounds that it plumbed new depths of bad taste.” Turns out they were right.
Anyway, Fulks has moved beyond this kind of stuff. Just listen to the songs on “Let’s Kill Saturday Night,” which seem to come more from Fulks’ heart and less from his twisted brain. For the best of Robbie Fulks, check out that album, along with his first two, and leave “The Very Best of Robbie Fulks” for the hardcore fans who need to own every last scrap.
While mainstream country continues to purvey a megaplatinum blandness, alternative country — or Americana, or insurgent country, or whatever you want to call it — is still thriving, artistically if not commercially. And one of the most distinctive, though largely unheralded, singer-songwriters working on the fringes of Nashville these days is Buddy Miller. His first two albums, “Your Love and Other Lies” (1995) and “Poison Love” (1997), were masterpieces of country soul, filled with twangy songs about passion, longing, pain and suffering — the great themes of both hard country and classic soul music.
His newest, “Cruel Moon,” recorded in his Nashville home studio, is as good as the first two. As usual, Miller is assisted by his equally talented wife, Julie, who wrote or co-wrote many of the songs on the album and also sings harmony vocals on quite a few. Other alt-country soul mates, including Jim Lauderdale, Kim Richey, Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris, pitch in. (Miller plays guitar in Spyboy, Harris’ backup band.) But Miller, who has a raw, bluesy voice that borrows as much from Otis Redding as it does from Hank Williams, is the main attraction.
It’s clear from the chilling first song — “Does My Ring Burn Your Finger?” — about a jealous man who murders his wife, that we’re far from Shania Twain country. “Now it’s just me and a knife/And I’m so brokenhearted,” Miller wails over the plaintive, minor-key plucking of a banjo, “I just wait in the dark here/With my dearly departed/Did my ring burn your finger?/Did my love weigh you down?/Was a promise too much to keep around?”
“Love Match,” written by Paul Kennerly and sung with Earle, lightens things up somewhat, even if it does liken a love affair to a boxing match. (“She’s a heartbreak champion of the love match.”) Miller turns “I’m Gonna Be Strong,” a Barry Mann-Cynthia Weil composition that was a bombastic 1964 hit for Gene Pitney, into a lovely country ballad about losing a love and trying to maintain some dignity in the process. And in the title song, a stunning duet with Harris, the moon is a willing accomplice in a heartbreak: “Oh cruel moon you shine so bright/And act like everything’s all right/You shine as if there’s nothing wrong/You shine on down like she’s not gone.”
The driving, edgy “Somewhere Trouble Don’t Go” shows why some critics have said that the Millers are at their best when they’re singing together. (The song ends with a loud amplifier buzz, a dig, perhaps, at Nashville’s obsession with slickness.) On the pure, simple “In Memory of My Heart,” they pay their respects to the great Louvin Brothers, whose tight harmony singing is an obvious influence.
For “Poison Love,” Miller recorded a knockout version of Redding’s “That’s How Strong My Love Is.” Too bad Redding never got to record “Sometimes I Cry,” a country soul ballad written by Miller, his wife and Lauderdale. It would have been right at home on “The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads.” “Cruel Moon” ends with Miller doing a cover of a lesser-known soul number, “It’s Been a Change,” a gospel-infused song written by Roebuck “Pop” Staples and originally recorded in 1967 by Solomon Burke, someone who also knew a thing or two about how soulful honest country music can be. (Burke once covered Bobby Bare’s classic “Detroit City.”)
A few years ago, an album titled “Rhythm Country & Blues” tried, with mixed results, to demonstrate the essential link between country and soul. (Lyle Lovett duets with Al Green on “Funny How Time Slips Away”; Sam Moore sings with Conway Twitty on “Rainy Night in Georgia.”) But the country-soul connection comes through in nearly every song Miller sings, even the twangiest ones. He may be a country singer, but he’s a soul man at heart.
It’s something of a shock to witness the great Wanda Jackson, a 61-year-old grandmother who became a born-again Christian in the 1970s, belt out a song like “Fujiyama Mama” — the two minutes of explosive sexuality that Jackson recorded in 1954 and released three years later. “I’m a Fujiyama mama/And I’m just about to blow my top,” she howled in Denver this weekend. “And when I start eruptin’/Ain’t nobody gonna make me stop.” For years, Jackson refused to sing her wonderful rockabilly hits, incendiary songs like “Rock Your Baby” and “Let’s Have a Party.” But her fans insisted, and after consulting with the Lord (and her husband), Jackson relented.
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.
George Jones is one of a handful of contenders for the title Greatest Living Country Singer. Born in 1931 and raised in dirt-poor conditions in East Texas, he began his singing career imitating his idol, Hank Williams. He quickly found his own remarkable voice, and after hitting it big with “Why, Baby, Why” in 1955, he went on to produce some of the most enduring music to come out of Nashville — songs like “Color of the Blues,” “The Window Up Above” and “She Thinks I Still Care.” His 1969 marriage to Tammy Wynette was fodder for the tabloids — they were known as “Mr. and Mrs. Country Music” — and Jones fell into a well-chronicled spiral of drug and alcohol abuse that nearly killed him. Shortly after Jones recorded “These Days (I Barely Get By)” (1975), Wynette walked out the door, and they soon divorced. When he published his autobiography, “I Live to Tell It All,” in 1996, he promised his self-destructive ways were way behind him.
Then, last March, Jones lost control of his Lexus and plowed into a bridge near his home outside Nashville, Tenn. He suffered a collapsed lung, a ruptured liver and internal bleeding. Miraculously, he survived. Jones later admitted he had been drinking — an empty bottle of vodka was found under the front seat — and he vowed one more time to kick the habit. “I came very close to death,” he said, “and I know the Lord works in mysterious ways and he spared me. I can only believe that he still has work for me to do here.”
Turns out that Jones had just about finished recording “Cold Hard Truth,” his first album for Asylum Records. And it’s a gem, the best record he’s made since “The Bradley Barn Sessions” (1994). Before the accident, Jones had planned to go back to the studio to re-record some of the vocals on “Cold Hard Truth.” It’s hard to imagine how they could have been improved upon, for Jones’ amazing vocal prowess is in top form. Even after 67 years of hard living, he can still outperform just about anybody in a cowboy hat. His voice — with its astonishing melisma and Sinatra-esque phrasing — is a gift from the heavens, an instrument of perfection in a world of pain and sorrow.
For “Cold Hard Truth,” producer Keith Stegall enlisted some of Nashville’s finest –including guitarist Brent Mason, fiddler Stuart Duncan and pianist Hargus “Pig” Robbins — to back up the master, and they do so in a spare, classic manner that never gets too slick.
When Jones left MCA Records last year, he accused the label of failing to market him properly. “They just wouldn’t spend the money,” he said at the time. Maybe so, but the fact is, his last two albums for the label, “I Lived to Tell It All” and “It Don’t Get Any Better Than This,” both suffered from weak material. On “Cold Hard Truth,” however, the songs are all standouts, and most of them are dark ballads about lost love and regretful decisions, subjects that Jones obviously knows a thing or two about.
“Choices,” which begins the album, wasn’t written by Jones, but it sounds like the story of his wild, woolly life: “I’ve had choices since the day that I was born/There were voices that told me right from wrong/If I had listened, I know I wouldn’t be here today/Living and dying with the choices I’ve made.” In the title song, which borrows its melody from Jones’ 1980 hit “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” the singer confronts his accusing conscience and discovers the “Cold Hard Truth” about his pitiful, self-deceptive existence. “Nobody’s perfect,” Jones answers in “Sinners & Saints,” “we’re just flesh and blood, one foot on the high road and one in the mud.” “Cold Hard Truth” isn’t George Jones’ swan song. But if it had been, the Possum would have left this sad old world on a high note.
Some of the finest country music ever produced was recorded not in Nashville but in Los Angeles, specifically at the Capitol Records tower on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. From this futuristic building, designed to look like a stack of records, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens and others — under the direction of Ken Nelson, Capitol’s in-house country producer — created a hard-driving West Coast sound that relied heavily on twangy Fender electric guitars and pedal steels.
In the early 1950s, Capitol hired ace guitar players Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West to play backup behind Tennessee Ernie Ford and Kay Starr. Bryant, a transplanted Georgian, played a Fender Broadcaster, one of the first solid-body guitars. West, from Missouri, played pedal steel. Together, they created a sort of manic country bebop — think of them as the Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie of country music.
Their music was all but forgotten by everyone except hardcore collectors and revivalist musicians until four years ago, when Razor & Tie released “Stratosphere Boogie: The Flaming Guitars of Speedy West & Jimmy Bryant,” which contains some of their best Capitol recordings, produced in the 1950s by Nelson and, for the most part, tossed off between backup sessions. Now, the label has issued volume two, and it’s as wonderful as the first. “Two of a Kind” sounds like some lost Charlie Parker tune. “West of Samoa” is other-worldly, with strange bird sounds emanating from West’s pedal steel. The mid-tempo “T-Bone Rag” shows Bryant at his most inventive, while “China Boy” demonstrates just how incredibly fast the man could play. “Deep Water” is sublime balladry, while “Pushin’ the Blues,” from 1955, is pure rock ‘n’ roll. The album ends with the appropriately named “Caffeine Patrol,” a revved-up ditty that lasts all of one minute, 48 seconds.
West and Bryant were fortunate to live and work in Los Angeles, far from the powers that be in Nashville. Music this adventurous could never have come out of the studios on Music Row.
