Farm Report: Country Music for Tender Emotional/Sensual Awakenings

Glen Rock, PA ? Ever since I wrote about the Bubba Book Club, in which me and Jesse gathered the farmers of southern York County to explore books and feelings, many readers just like you have inquired about our next selection. And considering what our endorsement did for Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Waiting to Exhale, the constant badgering from publishers was to be expected.

Like Oprah, we always look for positive books, books that can nurture our emotions and our spirit: in short, books so unbelievably stupid that even we can understand them.

Well. We gathered last Tuesday night in the barn and nestled ourselves comfortably amid the cattle and John Deere combines to discuss Sexing the Chicken: A Memoir of the Senses, by Philippe de Montebello, a book I can only describe as extremely deep and penetrating. This volume is so sensual, sensuous and sensitive that it will be an inspiration to men everywhere as we open ourselves to the wisdom of our own deepest desires.

Sexing the Chicken has a deeply inspirational and positive message that can give us all hope. Montebello has come a long way since he was born Sammy Schwartzbaum to a family of meatpackers on the banks of the stinking Cuyahoga. His book is the story of one man's sensual awakening, as he overcomes every barrier in his astonishing journey from irritating little chump to big big cheese.

The book is full of wonderful though incredibly dull and pretentious writing, but the ultimate tribute to Montebello's achievement is that all of us agricultural entrepreneurs started immediately to explore our deepest sensual desires. Fortunately, we still had a silo full of last year's feed corn.

And fortunately we also had a buttload of new country albums to provide a soundtrack for our emotional/sensual awakening.

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There's a lot to like about Brooks and Dunn. They've had some fantastic number of top-10 country hits over the last decade, and they've got a kind of a rowdy Southern rock/Tex-Mex thing going. They're capable of a beautiful or amusing trad country song, especially in a two-step dance mode. Ronnie Dunn is quite a great singer, and Kix Brooks adds wild guitar and kickass attitude.

Steers and Stripes (BMG) is quite a great album: consistently of the highest quality and bringing them straight back into the heart of the country. It ranges from straight-up hard rock ("The Last Thing I Do") to classic Texas country ("Deny Deny Deny"). Do you know how hard it is to write reviews that aren't boring and full of cliches?

Jim Lauderdale sings a lot like Ronnie Dunn, but with rougher edges (and a bit rougher relation to correct pitch). But he's also one of the great writers in country music. For the songs on The Other Sessions (Dualtone) he collaborates with such big-time geniuses of country composition as Melba Montgomery, Kostas, Harlan Howard and Del Reeves.

The songs are amazing. There's something about a perfect country song that makes me shiver or cry or come, and there are a bunch here, notably "I'd Follow You Anywhere" and the stupefyingly great "Merle World." And "Honky Tonk Haze" contains a line that summarizes the true motivation of every alcoholic (believe me, I know what I'm talking about), "Give me another hour and I won't know who I am."

Sammy Kershaw and Lorrie Morgan: fuck is wrong with these people? Do they hang out at BMG listening to demo tapes, sorting through piles of cool shit by Nashville's amazing bartenders and waitresses until they find the most insipid, empty crap anyone has ever heard, and then record it? Huh? Do they? They've both done great stuff in the past, but it has been a while, and by now the failure of taste is so prolonged, so pervasive and so severe that I feel that we should just give up on them.

They have recorded a duet album: I Finally Found Someone (BMG). The revival of the duet as a serious country genre is long overdue, and considering that Sammy and Lorrie are as good as any contemporary country singers, one would think that they're just the ones to do it. And they could be too, as revealed by the cool single "He Drinks Tequila (She Talks Dirty in Spanish)." So why is so much of this album pure unlistenable dreck? Why is John Ashcroft the attorney general? Some things shall remain forever shrouded in profound mystery.

I don't think Ol' Yeller is a good name for a band, do you? Not when you could call your band Personal Lubricant or the Total Bozos or American Taliban. A name can be very important. Crispin Sartwell, for instance, makes me sound like all English and crap. It gives me credibility, makes a fat farm boy sound like a philosophy professor. Philippe de Montebello impresses the hell out of Americans because it sounds sophisto and continental. Is it French or Italian? Really we don't know; in fact, we're not even sure that there's any difference. We just picture the blue blazer, the champagne, the accent, the soiree, the cash. The name reeks of art, that is, of money.

Yet Ol' Yeller is a hell of a band, and Ol' Yeller (SMA; P.O. Box 583183, Minneapolis, MN 55458) is a hell of an album. If they're an alt-country act then they're the best alt-country act I've heard in a while. Finding a groove somewhere between the Violent Femmes and the Byrds (see: I spelled it right!) they have a variety of modes, from a loping Dead-type pace to extremely focused alternative rock. They play beautifully, and despite the fact that one of the songs is called "You Can't Sing!" they sing beautifully too.

I can see a couple of these songs as actual rock radio hits, especially the varied-but-coherent "Haven't Tried Much." In fact, if this band doesn't make it big, I'm gonna kick some motherfucking honky record company radio programming executive fat fucked-up ass.

Split Lip Rayfield is I guess an alt-bluegrass act: completely acoustic and featuring banjo as the lead instrument on most cuts. But it doesn't have traditional harmonies, or the virtuosic playing that's typical of bluegrass. And therein lies the problem. While there are some good songs here, and while I appreciate a few rough edges, especially as compared to the perfectly processed music of recent Alison Krauss and Nickel Creek albums, there really is no reason to listen to these folks play a banjo solo when so many mainstream bluegrass players just slay your ass.

A better model of rough-edged bluegrass is Dry Branch Fire Squad. If I were buying one album, I'd get Memories that Bless and Burn (Rounder), a collection of their gospel songs issued in 1999, and one of the best albums in any genre to come out in the last decade. But that's not to say that you shouldn't also get a hold of Hand Hewn (Rounder).

Dry Branch Fire Squad is not about virtuosity but about a total commitment to traditional American music: Hand Hewn is a good title. Astonishingly, everything they do sounds like it could have been made any time in the last century. On the other hand, their sound does not seem self-consciously archaic or archival, but rather perfectly natural and even effortless. Most of these songs are by "traditional" and the others sound like they are.

Ken Waldman is a unique specimen. Half beat poet and half Celtic/old-time American fiddle master, he hails from Alaska and talks and scratches his way through A Week in Eek (Nomadic Press, 3705 Arctic, #1551, Anchorage AK 99503; 907-258-1051). According to information theory, saying the same thing again conveys no new information and is redundant or empty. All traditional music, from Celtic to blues to aboriginal to reggae disproves this. Music relies on repetition and each repetition emerges from and into a new context. Waldman is a good case of this: the melodies are extremely simple and the fiddling just flows into them and stays there, creating a mood rather than a melody.

What beat poets and traditional musicians have in common is a kind of primitivism, a desire to lapse into what is primordial and final and fundamental in the human condition. And as Waldman gives you odd lessons in banjo frailing or living through high school he also brings you toward a center that is both musical and ethical, toward a set of elusive but down-home truths.

The harmonica is at the moment a rather neglected instrument. You don't hear it in country as much as you used to when Charlie McCoy did (it seemed) every Nashville session, and everyone seems a bit tired of John Popper's extremely fast but inexpressive runs. It's hard to name a single new master of the blues harp who's emerged in the last 20 years, and such players of jazz and standards as Larry Adler are aged.

That's one reason why Allen Holmes' album Doris in Mind (Chase's Stitch Records, P.O.Box 57, Occoquan, VA22125) is cool and timely. Holmes is a master of the chromatic harmonica, and he gives a consummate performance here, sometimes overtracking several harps on jazz standards and originals. It's truly a lovely thing to have on under dinner or to soothe your jangled nerves, or for a sensual journey of self-exploration. Holmes' free reeds have such a sweet timbre or texture, and one so different from what you're used to, that even the nicest little instrumental becomes absorbing.

The disc takes on a transcendent quality when Allen's wife, Alison Radcliffe-Holmes, starts singing. A musically straightforward but emotionally complex singer in the style of Billie Holiday or on the other hand Mahalia Jackson (!), she handles a couple of songs here with dignity and beauty.

I'll close with this deeply inspiring observation from Sexing the Chicken: "Country music, like Vermeer and bestiality, yields the most profound insight into the human condition, calling us at once out of and into ourselves as creatures for whom the highest truths are also and at once the most superficial claptrap. Go forth and love yourselves; go forth and love your fellow creatures."