While the musical purity of their harmony-propelled numbers for guitar and mandolin remains intact, today it is nearly impossible to listen to the Louvin Brothers without smirking at their dogmatic, sensationalist, and explicitly closed-minded take on Christianity. Nor is it easily to ignore the contradictions between the implicit humility of their homespun vocals and the arrogance of their loftiest moral sentiments, or between their unflinching behavioral imperatives and Ira’s own caustic mean-streaks tinged by his racism and severe alcoholism. The brothers’ decision to depict a devil with horns and a pitchfork on the cover of Satan on Real now seems like kitsch comedy.

Listening to a song like “Broadminded,” approximately 50 years after it was originally recorded therefore demands a multi-layered process of contextualization. To these ears, precisely because time has rendered quaint and hopelessly idealistic the Louvin Brothers’ line-in-the-sand preaching , it has ultimately turned their sentiments poignant. When the brothers sing “That word broadminded, is spelled S-I-N, I read in my bible, they shall not enter in,” and Ira’s mandolin echoes, the Louvins convey a sense of moral certainty that is not oppressive, but liberating. It fails to oppress because the Louvins lost the struggle–closedmindedness is today’s black sheep; it liberates because it is great music born out of ideological rigidity–suddenly a rare commodity in this age of irony, cynicism, relativism, and doubt.

He Just Came To Smell The Flowers

Dolly Parton is said to have joked about her break from duet partner and mentor Porter Wagoner: “we split over creative differences—I was creative, he was different.” As with all things Parton, there’s more substance here than meets the eye. Wagoner truly was different, and that was always what made him special. The man who introduced one of the great female country personalities to the world had a storied and singular career of his own that continued to flourish until his death last Sunday at the age of 80.

More than any other country star of his stature, Wagoner transcended superficial stylistic boundaries and labels. He was a fixture at country music’s most hallowed institution, the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, yet he was an Outlaw before Waylon and Willie—before the term even existed. He wore extravagant rhinestone Nudie suits well ahead of Gram Parsons, and though he sang with one of country’s great crossover stars, his idiosyncratic style was such that Waylon once opined: “He couldn’t go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers.”

Because he was never a man of his time he was never out of fashion, and at no point did the generational chasm between him and contemporary country music render him a nostalgia act. In his last years he recorded Wagonmaster, a powerful comeback album for Anti Records, opened for the White Stripes at Madison Square Garden, secured his own entry in The Rock Snob’s Dictionary, and even submitted to an interview with Borat before the latter hit the big screen.
Most remarkable of all, though, is that this man who traveled so far from home never lost sight of it. Seeing him perform a two-song set at the Opry on a Friday night this August rekindled my hope that the future of country of music could be reconciled with its past. He did it with such ease that I wonder if it wasn’t the last thing on his mind.

—–

And then there are the many humbler hometowns, like mine–Buffalo, NY–that without birthing any style singular enough to reach the national radar, have quietly cultivated dozens of important musical talents over the years. While Buffalo can lay claim to a handful of contemporary and erstwhile stars–Harold Arlen, Rick James, Brian McKnight, the Goo Goo Dolls, Ani Difranco, Mercury Rev–it has also been the launching pad for a number of acts with less name recognition but as much or more talent. One such artist is singer-songwriter Willie Nile, a Buffalo native who became a Greenwich Village fixture after attending the University of Buffalo. While Nile has never achieved notoriety or financial success to match the critical acclaim he has earned, he has produced a handful of accomplished full-lengths since the early 80s, and two of these–his self-titled 1980 debut and 2006′s Streets of New York–have the timeless quality of classics.

With the literate-rocker aesthetic of a new wave-era Elvis Costello or Nick Lowe, Nile is, at his best, a man who tosses off wisdom and addictive hooks with equal enthusiasm and ease. “Vagabond Moon,” the first cut on his first album, still stands as Nile’s finest–a rush of exuberance and feeling that narrowly outdoes several other gems on the record, such as “She’s So Cold,” “That’s The Reason,” and “It’s All Over.” It is that last track, though, on which Nile shows that even without clever words, he can be devastatingly effective. “It’s all over” he sings endlessly and anxiously until the last repeat, at which time his voice rises to resolution and he tacks on the word “now” as if only just ‘now’ resigning himself to reality.

In one sense, Seymour is correct in claiming that Skip James’s quintessential track is a singular masterpiece. James was very much an atypical bluesman–a proud man whose primary concern was for his own idiosyncratic artistry rather than his audience or the blues tradition to which he sometimes appeared tangential. James’s style, which was marked by disjointed, gloomy guitar licks played on an abnormally tuned guitar, was the product of his musical evolution in the metaphorical island that was his hometown: Bentonia, Mississippi. This was a local sound, however, and it is in that respect that it may be something of a stretch to say that “Devil Got My Woman” is unlike any other record. Enough of a musical community existed among James and his influences–most notably Henry Stuckey, the bluesman who is said to have taught James his signature tuning–that their sound was adopted by other locals such as Jack Owens and Cornelius Bright. The Bentonian school was a unique marvel to be sure–James simply wasn’t the only pupil.

It was the Talk of the Town in this week’s New Yorker that first allerted me to the new Janet Reno executed-produced compilation Song of America, though a few internet searches have since directed me to many other articles addressing the collection. The release of the 50-track recording this Tuesday is a development that can only be described as remarkably interesting. Move over John “Let the Eagle Soar” Ashcroft–there’s a new, old Attorney General who loves music about America. And here we were thinking that Ms. Reno was at the peak of powers during her famous Dance Party on SNL! Not only does Ms. Reno have the kind of ability to laugh at herself that has long been sought after in vain by politicians from Al Gore to Hillary Clinton, but apparently she also has pretty legit taste in music. I give her credit not because such trendy names as Devendra Banhart and Andrew Bird appear on the compilation but because of her idea for set–artists, old and new, performing songs about our nation. As Nick Paumgarten makes clear in his piece for Talk of the Town, Reno has an understanding of the rich and important relationship between American’s history and its vernacular music. If that weren’t enough, though, her hyperbolic enthusiasm for one Virginia Patterson Hensley is the coup de grace. “I think Patsy Cline was a genius,” she told Paumgarten. “I just wonder what the world would’ve been like if Patsy Cline had lived.” I fall to pieces.

That much, he knew, it was inner.

But after hellfire struck him down,

Mid-stride, rocking music town,

He forsook shaking, balls of fire

To countryside he did retire.

Another time another place,

Led Killer to the penance face.

Filled with guilt and with regret,

Were his yodels, and they met

The twang, the moans, the pedal steel–

Roots redemption held appeal.

Still pentecostal contradiction

Was his muse, if not his diction;

Ivory makes many sounds

Hypocrisy though, knows no bounds

Milwaukee–stated Killies’ heel–

Disguised defying God was real.

Disc two is a personal favorite that hits the ground running with a one-two punch: Wolf’s rendition of “Spoonful” followed by Otis Rush’s “You Know My Love.” ‘Spoonful’ is a remarkably evocative word to associate with love and each of its connotations–nourishing, petty, enriching, small–comes out, as Wolf howls intensely and stunningly lyrical guitar lines swirl about his every word. But just when you think the best is behind you, Otis Rush’s severe voice follows the sneaky baseline introduction of “You Know My Love.” When he wails “You know my love, You know my love, you know my love has never died,” it’s impossible not to know the truth of every word. Recordings like these are the blues at its best–moments infused with such raw emotional power that they transform resignation into affirmation.

Along with Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb, Snow was one of the great original honky tonk singers. Despite hailing from a conspicuously atypical hometown for a country singer, Nova Scotia, Canada, Snow recorded many country hits in the early 50s. Perhaps his most significant role in popular music history was not as a singer, however, but as a man who helped shape the formative years of Elvis Presley’s music career. Initially Snow affected Elvis by securing for him a spot at the Grand Ole Opry. Not long after that, however, he inadvertently set in motion Elvis’s shift away from country music and toward massive crossover success by introducing him to a then unknown booking agent: Colonel Tom Parker.

Hitchcockian in its methodical intensity, Blood Simple is a twisted and twist-filled story of the betrayals, confusion, and murder that surround a wife’s infidelity. Written by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin and originally recorded by the honky-tonk hero Lefty Frizzell, “Long Black Veil” is the story of a man who accepts a death sentence for murder rather than reveal his alibi because at the time of the killing he was in bed with his best friend’s wife. Told by the executed man, “Long Black Veil” is, like Blood Simple, loaded with a cruel irony that’s only enhanced by its dreamy, timeless quality.

Johnny Cash’s version from Live at Folsom Prison, probably the most dramatic version I’ve heard, is punctuated by a cackle from Cash after he sings “I spoke not a word, though it meant my life, I had been in the arms of my best friend’s wife” and thinks he hears someone in the audience applaud. It’s the kind of laugh I imagine took hold of Joel Coen the first time he watched the Blood Simple credits fall to the sound of the Temptations’ “It’s the Same Old Song”–or, better yet, his original selection, the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer.”