Classic Rewind: Carlene Carter – ‘The Sweetest Thing’

Classic Rewind: Carlene Carter – ‘Easy From Now On’

In memory of Susanna Clark who wrote this great song with Carlene, and who died yesterday:

Classic Rewind: Carlene Carter with the Carter Family – ‘Worried Man Blues’

Album Review: Emmylou Harris – ‘Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town’

Emmylou’s fourth album was released in January 1978 on Warner Brothers, which had taken over her contract from the subsidiary Reprise. A personal favorite of mine, it contains a number of her classic recordings. The lineup marks the replacement of Rodney Crowell in the Hot Band by Ricky Skaggs, with both men playing on the record. The arrangements and musicians are, as usual, impeccable. There was a change of emphasis with the selection of material, with no classic revivals this time (although a number of the tracks have become classics in their own right since), but a concentration on new songs.  The quality of material is as high as Emmylou’s fans had come to expect. Emmylou was now married to producer Brian Ahern, and their personal and professional partnership showed them in perfect tune. Ironically, given her newlywed status, the overarching theme is one of leaving, whether that means a lover or spouse, a parent, or life itself.

One of the classics born on this record was the first single. ‘To Daddy’ was written by Dolly Parton, who generously relinquished the opportunity to sing the song to her friend, not recording it herself for many years. Emmylou’s subtle version was a big hit, reaching #3. The devastating lyric tells the story of a downtrodden wife and mother who suffers silently for years with her neglectful and uncaring husband, and then leaves with as little fuss as she made during the marriage:

She never meant to come back home
If she did, she never did say so to Daddy

Told from the viewpoint of one of the children, Emmylou delivers one of her purest vocals, allowing the lyrics to speak for themselves. This is still one of my favorite Emmylou Harris recordings. It was followed on the charts by the #1 hit ‘Two More Bottles Of Wine’, an up-tempo rocking-blues Delbert McClinton song which offers a defiant response to loneliness and a lover’s departure:

It’s alright cause it’s midnight and I got two more bottles of wine

Another song now widely (and rightly) regarded as a classic, the poetic ‘Easy From Now On’, written by Guy Clark’s wife Susanna and a young Carlene Carter (billed by her first married name of Routh), peaked at #12. Emmylou sounds a little sad as she plans to drink the night away following the end of a relationship. The lyrics provide the album’s title, and Susanna Clark also painted the picture used for the cover art.

Rodney Crowell, about to leave the Hot Band to launch his own solo career, contributed a couple of songs as a parting gift. There are Cajun touches to the story song ‘Leaving Louisiana In The Broad Daylight , which was later a hit for the Oak Ridge Boys. Rick Danko of The Band sings harmony and his bandmate Garth Hudson plays sax and accordion. The driving ‘I Ain’t Living Long Like This’ is a hard-boiled country rocker addressed to a low-life individual headed for life in jail, and Rodney’s own version was to be the title track of his debut album later the same year, also on Warner Brothers.

Willie Nelson sings a prominent harmony on the folky ‘One Paper Kid’, a downbeat story about another of life’s failures, set to an attractive tune and a very simple acoustic backing consisting of Mickey Raphael’s harmonica and Emmylou herself on guitar. The pair had toured together, and their voices blend beautifully on another highlight.

The tribute to the ‘Green Rolling Hills’ of West Virginia, written by folk singer Utah Phillips, is sung as a duet with Emmylou’s longtime harmony singer Fayssoux Starling, which sounds just lovely. Ricky Skaggs, Rodney Crowell’s replacement in the Hot Band, plays fiddle and viola on this track, foreshadowing the changes his influence was to bring in Emmylou’s music.

Singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester contributed two songs, the beautiful and perhaps metaphorical ballad ‘My Songbird’ and the swooping and allusive ‘Defying Gravity’, with Nicolette Larson on harmony. The album closes with the slowed down bluesy rockabilly of ‘Burn That Candle’, which is the only track I don’t much like, with some very odd emphases in the pronunciation.

The 2004 CD reissue included two previously unreleased live cuts from the early 80s with a Cajun flavor – Guy Clark’s ‘New Cut Road’ and ‘Lacassine Special’ (sung in French). They are well performed, but feel a little out of place here.

Grade: A

Album Review: Terri Clark – ‘Fearless’

Perhaps feeling pigeon-holed by country radio, Terri Clark sought a change in direction for her fourth studio release. She hired a new producer, Steuart Smith and turned to fellow singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter to supply her with some new material. The result is a more introspective set of songs, with less twang and more contemporary and middle-of-the-road production. Heralded by many critics as an artistic triumph, country radio was singularly unimpressed and shunned Fearless after the first single peaked at #13. In recent years, radio has become an increasingly unreliable judge of music quality, but this is one time I am firmly in radio’s corner; with one or two exceptions, Fearless is a dull and lifeless collection with little of the charm found in Clark’s previous work. It is my least favorite album in her catalog.

Fearless could just have easily been titled Terri Clark Sings Mary Chapin Carpenter, for Carpenter’s influence can be heard throughout the album, including and beyond the three tracks that she co-wrote. I find Carpenter’s music to be very hit or miss; when she’s great, she’s really great, but many of her albums are tedious to get through. Some of the songs on Fearless might have worked better if Carpenter were singing them, but the style just doesn’t work for Terri Clark. When I listen to a Terri Clark album, I want to hear Terri Clark, not a Mary Chapin Carpenter wannabe.

The lead single, “A Little Gasoline” is one of two tracks on which Terri’s previous producer Keith Stegall acts as a co-producer. It is closer in style to Terri’s earlier work and is the only truly radio-friendly track on the album. There must have been some concern — justified, as it turned out –that radio would not be receptive to Clark’s new sound, and “A Little Gasoline” seems to have been selected as an insurance policy against that. The strategy was somewhat successful; “A Little Gasoline” received enough airplay to reach #13 and become the album’s most successful single. The remaining singles did not fare as well: “No Fear” stalled at #27, “Gettin’ There” reached #41 and the mind-numbingly dull “Empty” did not chart at all.

The one truly enjoyable track on the album is Terri’s exquisite remake of the Carlene Carter-Susanna Clark song “Easy From Now On”. Emmylou Harris, whose definitive version reached #12 in 1978, sings harmony. The stripped-down acoustic guitar and fiddle arrangement gives the track a Celtic feel. It’s a beautiful, well performed and tastefully produced recording. It’s a shame that none of the album’s other tracks come even close to matching it.

Though the album is not to my personal taste, Terri deserves great credit for trying something different, instead of resting on her creative laurels. In theory, collaborating with acclaimed songwriters such as Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kim Richey and Beth Nielsen Chapman sounds like a good idea, but the results just don’t seem to be a good fit for Clark. Like her two previous albums, it reached #4 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart; however, it was her first album that failed to earn gold or platinum certification in the United States. It did earn gold certification in Canada, representing sales of 50,000 units or approximately half the Canadian sales of her previous album.

Grade: C

Fearless is not essential listening, but diehard fans can purchase it inexpensively from Amazon.

Classic Rewind: Carlene Carter – ‘Me And The Wildwood Rose’

Classic Rewind: Carlene Carter – ‘Unbreakable Heart’

RIP Carl Smith (1927-2010)

It has been reported that 50s and 60s star Carl Smith, the father of Carlene Carter, died yesterday.

Here are a few of his hits:

Album Review: Patty Loveless – ‘Sleepless Nights’

Patty Loveless was dropped by Epic following disappointing sales and minimal airplay for her last album for the label, Dreamin’ My Dreams. She was in no hurry to make her next move, taking some time off the road to move down to Georgia, and dealing with family deaths and illness, but in 2008 she signed with the independent label Saguaro Road, and in September that year she released a new album, produced as usual by husband Emory Gordy Jr. She cast aside thoughts of regaining her chart-topping status, and instead recorded a tribute to traditional country music. It was heralded as a kind of companion piece or counterpart to 2001’s Mountain Soul, as it was billed on the cover as “the traditional country soul” of Patty Loveless. What resulted was even better than we could have expected. Sleepless Nights is a masterpiece.

Classic cover albums have a tendency to fall into one of two main categories: excessively cautious tributes where the artist sounds frankly overwhelmed by the thought of competing with a much-loved original, and ends up producing a carbon copy or high quality karaoke; and trying too hard to put their own stamp on the material in such a way that the merits of the original song are stifled. Sleepless Nights triumphantly avoids either pitfall. Patty sounds thoroughly invested in the material and style, and makes it sound alive. Her versions of each of these songs sounds as though it could have been the original classic version.

George Jones is a very challenging artist to risk comparison with, although perhaps it is less dangerous for a female vocalist where the comparisons will inevitably be less deleterious. Patty had already successfully tackled one Jones classic in the form of ‘If My Heart Had Windows’ back in the early days, and she chose to open Sleepless Nights with George’s first hit single (in 1955), the honky tonking ‘Why Baby Why’ (with a couple of minor lyric changes to fit the change in gender) which also served as the single released to promote this album. Sadly, if predictably, it was far too traditional for today’s country radio, but it is a perfect opening to the album as Patty tears into the song, the most up-tempo on the set.

Patty also picked three more Jones songs, including a truly lovely version of one of his greatest classics (written by Dickey Lee). ‘She Thinks I Still Care’ is altered here to ‘He Thinks I Still Care’. There is a fantastic take on ‘Color Of The Blues’ on which Patty actually achieves the almost impossible: improving on a song once recorded by George Jones as she infuses the lyric with pain. The most obscure Jones cover is ‘That’s All It Took’, from one of his 1960s duet albums with pop singer Gene Pitney, which is probably best known today from the 1970s cover by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Patty’s version features her former guitarist, Australian Jedd Hughes, on harmonies.