Country – Page 10 – Rock Salted

Bob Dylan – Nashville Skyline

Bob Dylan – Nashville Skyline Columbia KCS 9825 (1969)

It is almost a cliché for pop musicians of a certain vintage not normally associated with country music to release a “country” album. The timing is always when their sales are declining and they are on the long downward slope that almost inevitably afflicts their careers as they leave behind their best years as artists. One sobering truth about the pop music business is that the vast majority of acts have only about five to ten years or so of genuine relevance — if they are lucky to have any relevance at all. Sure, there are exceptions, but taking a large enough step backwards the trend is unmistakable. Yet the allure of doing a “country” album is great enough that it is one of those thing that seems inevitable for long-running acts. The first major artist to really do it was Ray Charles with Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. The Byrds did it with Sweetheart of the Rodeo too. Even decades later, Elvis Costello did it with Almost Blue, Frank Black did it with Honeycomb, etc. Nashville Skyline was Dylan’s foray into full-fledged country music — he had recorded in Nashville before, but he wasn’t pursuing country music then. The reasons Dylan or anyone else would make a record like this are many-fold. There is usually some crass motive to find cross-over success (reach new demographics and potential new sales!). Sometimes it’s just a self-indulgence that past success has enabled (always loved country music but didn’t have the credentials or label support to make it happen before, here is a chance for a vanity project!). Or it could even be slumming (oooh, making a country album would be something different and exotic!). Other times, it’s just desperation (writer’s block and creative dead-ends…hmm, well, why not a country album?). It’s become something a little more shocking for a non-country artist to make country music in the Unites States, given the social context of modern times. Popular country music, from the countrypolitan era onward, has really severed many ties from its origins in folk music. It’s often a campy self-parody that talks down to its listeners. Add to that the fact that urban middle-class liberals tend to harbor great hostility toward “rednecks” (the rural poor) and even blue-collar types (the urban working class) and it is the “rednecks” and some of the urban working class that are the core audience of modern country music.

So where do Bob Dylan and his Nashville Skyline fit into all this? For many, this was the album that marked the beginning of the end for Dylan. His early years showed him to be a talented but not iconoclastic folk singer. He stayed within the bounds of that tradition. But then he went electric, shocking and appalling many narrow-minded folkies, and in doing so his songwriting adopted the currency of the beat generation. It was this mid-Sixties period that made Bob Dylan into a cultural icon. But by the end of the decade, and after his motorcycle crash, he was largely done with his beat-poet songwriting. John Wesley Harding presented a slightly different type of songwriting, built more around mythology and simpler, less literary forms. But traces of his earlier styles remained. This, his next album, would be a kind of break, looking into completely new areas for a new style of songwriting.* Dylan looked to country music.

This is an effective album, even if it’s not littered with classic songs. The re-make of “Girl From the North Country” sung with Johnny Cash and “Lay Lady Lay” are the standouts (in spite of Dylan and Cash singing different lyrics at one point in their duet). But the rest is still quite good. This is no Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde, but what is? Dylan certainly had no hostility to the working class, and even proved to have a very conservative affinity to it that confused many who labelled him a countercultural revolutionary. The key to this album is that Dylan wasn’t just slumming. He had a genuine appreciation for country music. It may not be his forte exactly, but he manages to demonstrate some versatility. The bad news in all this is that this was just the first instance of Dylan flapping in the wind for the next many years trying out new things — without really sticking with any — and generally just losing touch with his strengths as a songwriter. But what happened later should not tarnish this album, which is quite good despite falling short of being a major classic. And while this feels a tad escapist, like Dylan trying to cheer himself up with a dose of music he had long appreciated from a distance, well, he makes a convincing go of it.

*My hypothesis is that celebrity-status Dylan didn’t read as much poetry anymore and lost touch with that element.

Willie Nelson – Countryman

Willie Nelson – Countryman Lost Highway B0004706-02 (2005)

Oh, Willie. Countryman is his reggae album “10 years in the making” (says the album sleeve — in reality it must be that no one wanted to release it). The one inspired choice is a cover of Johnny Cash‘s “I’m a Worried Man,” which Cash wrote about a man he encountered in Jamaica, sung here as a duet with Toots Hibbert of Toots & The Maytals. Otherwise, this tiresome genre exercise has nothing to offer. “Straight” country versions of reggae songs (like he does for “The Harder They Come” here) would have worked better than Willie singing against a reggae beat. Still waiting on Willie’s hip-hop album.

Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel – Willie and the Wheel

Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel – Willie and the Wheel Bismeaux Records BR 1287 (2009)

Willie Nelson has always loved western swing. Recent albums like You Don’t Know Me evidenced that fascination. Teamed with Asleep at the Wheel, Willie and the Wheel is as self-consciously retro as it could be. Every song reaches to reproduce the sound of a classic 1940s cut by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. This record is a ton of fun. Yet, it also can’t get past its obligations to maintaining its “retro” sound. So this glides by somewhat on the surface. Willie has offered quite a lot of music at that level in his later years. It’s almost a very good one, but lacks a little something hard to put a finger on.

Johnny Cash – Unchained

Johnny Cash – Unchained American 9 43097-2 (1996)

Rather than do another solo acoustic album after smashing success with that approach, Johnny Cash teams up with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as his backing band to deliver something a lot more energetic and loud. Other guests include Flea, Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood. If American Recordings needed to strip everything away to prove that Cash’s voice was still a force to be reckoned with, then this follow-up is granted the space to demonstrate that it was Nashville keeping Cash down and out for so many years. It’s like this: Cash was always an outsider to the country music establishment. But along the way, he started courting it. Those were bleak years. When paired with a rock band, incorporating a few rock songs, and working with a rock producer, Cash can still cook. Nashville just seems so irrelevant. This album demonstrates versatility, and refuses to let some kind of formula settle in. It’s probably the most energetic record he made since Carryin’ On almost thirty years earlier. The dirty secret though is that this album is much like The Mystery of Life from five years earlier or Rockabilly Blues from more than 15 years earlier just with better production and better songs. Another interesting comparison would be to Elvis Country (I’m 10,000 Years Old) from Elvis‘ comeback, with 25 years’ difference in perspective on what constituted a “contemporary” sound. It was fortunate Cash made this record when he did, because health problems would not permit it just a few years later. Key tracks: “Spiritual,” “I’ve Been Everywhere,” “Mean-Eyed Cat,” “Memories Are Made of This,” and “Rowboat.”

Johnny Cash – American Recordings

Johnny Cash – American Recordings American 491797 2 (1994)

Johnny Cash made one of the biggest comebacks in memory with American Recordings (perhaps only Louis Armstrong‘s surprise 1964 hit “Hello, Dolly!” comes close). Cash had struggled for the preceding two decades to maintain an interest in recording as well as to find a producer that could do justice to his older voice. It wasn’t that Cash’s many previous albums were all bad, but they were uneven and often misguided. They usually tried to take him and fit him into current trends, however awkwardly (think Leonard Cohen‘s unfortunate meeting with producer Phil Spector on Death of a Ladies’ Man). That was a mistake because it tended to devalue what made Cash so great — that rich baritone voice and his disarming earnestness — by insisting that he could only succeed by transforming himself into something else. Unlikely enough, though, by the late 1980s Cash was quietly changing all that. He made a few albums that, while still rather mediocre, had a stately feel that was quite natural for his new coarser and more gravelly voice, which subtly (or unsubtly – “Beans for Breakfast”) had more vibrato than years before. But he was still dragging along a backing band that should have been put out to pasture long ago. And the production values on so many of his albums had still lurched between various fads, from countrypolitan to urban cowboy, that haven’t aged well.

Rick Rubin, who rose to fame in the world of hip-hop and later extended his reach to rock and metal, sought out Cash and made him the key signing for his newly-formulated record label American Recordings (formerly Def American). What Rubin did wasn’t all that surprising. The popular television specials “MTV Unplugged” had been presenting a variety of rock/pop musicians in low-key acoustic settings with great success. And other established artists like John Cale (Fragments of a Rainy Season) and Bob Dylan (Good as I Been to You) had found renewed success (at least critically) with solo acoustic recordings in recent years. Also, Willie Nelson had recently released the collection of stripped down recordings of old tunes (The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories?) to help pay off well-publicized tax debts. Rubin applied that popular trend to Cash, and it was a perfect fit. All the dross that cluttered Cash’s albums for so long was immediately stripped away. Rather than trying to sound like what was popular at the time, he could just sound timeless. It’s only his voice and an acoustic guitar. Everything comes through on record very clear and natural. Cash gets to be Cash without anything to stand in the way. It helps too that Cash gets to re-record songs he’s done before (like the hauntingly grisly “Delia’s Gone”) with a smattering of other cover songs that seem tailor-made for him. By keying into the darker side of Cash’s music, this album also appealed to rock audiences that maybe had heard the name Johnny Cash but never bothered with his music before. While still ignored by much of the country music establishment — which incidentally had not done much of value for decades — this album succeeded in launching Cash into the booming music market of the 1990s, the last time (as of this writing) there was any effort by mainstream media to push music of any substantive quality. Of course, a big reason that Cash was able to find so much commercial success in this comeback was the marketing effort put forward on his behalf for the first time in a long time. It was all black & white photography, bold lettering of the name CASH, and a confident, lived-in and knowing ambiance, with a hint of rural underclass danger. Rubin does deserve credit for looking to Cash when no one else would, and for matching him up with a recording style and marketing package that suited him. Plenty of songs from these sessions that didn’t make it onto the album ended up on the very good box set Unearthed.

Willie Nelson – Band of Brothers

Willie Nelson – Band of Brothers Sony/Legacy 8884 301921 26 (2014)

It’s a rather sad state of affairs when an album as bad as Band of Brothers becomes Willie Nelson’s most commercially popular new release in 28 years (since 1986’s The Promiseland). This one has a special twist: Willie is writing new songs. Nine of these songs are new, and it has been about two decades (!) since he released an album of mostly new material. Now, while much has been made of Willie’s new songwriting, it bears mentioning that it’s not strictly true. Willie co-wrote the nine new songs with Buddy Cannon, who also produces. Not that it matters that much, but it is a strong hint that the buzz around this album is marketing-driven rather than musically-driven. The new songs seem decent enough. They recall the writing of the Willie of 40-50 years ago. But the recordings bear almost no resemblance to that creature. This is music that could have come from nearly any country performer today. Willie just happens to be singing. He has outlived most of his long-time touring band, so he’s performing with a lot of relatively new faces. So even though Willie is no longer being lazy when it comes to songwriting, he’s merely become lazier than every about performing these songs. If you want an album that sounds like any other country album, congratulations, you’ve found one. If you want one with its own character, keep looking.

Willie Nelson – The Willie Way

Willie Nelson – The Willie Way RCA Victor LSP-4760 (1972)

Willie Nelson’s albums for RCA tend to be maligned, as he was catering to the Nashville system and so often those recordings were leaden with sappy string treatments, overbearing backing vocalists, and gaudy steel guitar. Some fans note that 1971’s Yesterday’s Wine broke the mold. But the changes go deeper than that one effort. In late December of 1970 Nelson’s home Ridgetop in Tennessee caught fire, forcing him (and members of his band and entourage) to relocate to the abandoned Lost Valley Ranch in Bandera, Texas for a while. The move gave him a respite from the pressured atmosphere of the Nashville area, and renewed his ties to his home state of Texas. Life on the ranch was something of a subsistence, communal one. Together with Nelson’s interest in certain rock phenomena, like the Woodstock and Atlanta Pop festivals, this introduced elements of a liberal rock aesthetic. Or perhaps they just stirred up things that had circulated in Nelson’s band from tours to places like San Fransisco in the 1960s, when they took to wearing flamboyant costumes.

After returning to his refurbished Ridgetop home in fall 1971, Nelson recorded his final RCA sessions. Among those were preliminary takes of material that would be rerecorded later for Phases and Stages on Atlantic Records. Although superficially Nelson was back in the Nashville fold, it’s clear that his music was different. The recordings on The Willie Way demonstrate the changes. A harpsichord on “Home Is Where You’re Happy” lends, just slightly, the flavor of psychedelic rock or mod British Invasion pop. There is a bit of that influence on the reading of the Appalachian folk classic “Mountain Dew” here too.

A lot of listeners skip right past much of the RCA years, at least after Yesterday’s Wine, to Willie’s efforts on the fledgling country department of New York-based Atlantic. That is a mistake — forgivable though given the lack of promotion and limited pressings of the albums of this era. The two albums RCA released from from Nelson’s last six sessions in 1971 or 1972 The Words Don’t Fit the Picture and The Willie Way are perhaps his very best from his entire decade-long tenure on RCA. They balance the conventions of Nashville with inklings of forward-looking rock influences. By this time Willie knew the Nashville approach and was actually getting pretty adept at playing that game, even in an offhand way. Willie also was actually writing some good songs, like the opener “You Left a Long, Long Time Ago.” His other songs selections, like Kris Kristofferson‘s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” are excellent too. The Willie Way may not quite match The Words Don’t Fit the Picture (it trails off a bit at the end), but it’s still among Willie’s best albums from before his commercial breakthrough a few years on in the mid-1970s.

Johnny Cash – Ride This Train

Johnny Cash – Ride This Train Columbia CS 8255 (1960)

When Cash signed to Columbia, one of his two initial requests was to do a concept album (the other being to do a gospel album). Ride This Train is a concept album built around stories and songs about American working people of the Nineteenth Century, the places they called home, and their exploits and travails. The album features spoken narrations by Cash set to sounds of an old coal-powered steam train interspersed among songs with generally spare, acoustic musical accompaniment. The approach is modeled on the format of old radio shows. Cash is acting. Looking back over 50 years later, the closest equivalent would be the radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion, with a lot less emphasis on comedy. As these kinds of albums go, this one ain’t all bad. The stories are kind of intriguing and all of the songs are very nice, though Cash may have done a little better with the same basic format on Sings the Ballads of the True West. Here, he stretches a bit far in trying to portray some sort of authentic aura of the old west, lapsing into the role of amateur archivist or anthropologist. This is far from essential Cash and will be enjoyed most by established fans and listeners interested in something along the lines of musical theater.

Johnny Cash – Songs of Our Soil

Johnny Cash – Songs of Our Soil Columbia CS 8148 (1959)

Songs of Our Soil was an important album in developing the sound of most of Johnny Cash’s albums of the following decade. The Fabulous Johnny Cash had mostly continued with the same reverb-laden minimalist country with a rock-inflected beat and emphasis on love songs as on Sings the Songs That Made Him Famous. But here the guitar is less loud, and things like a piano feature on occasion too. Backing vocals by The Jordanaires are frequent. Cash’s voice is a little more distinct and prominent. Reverb and twang are quietly diminished. The result is something a little more folk than country sounding, with a sophistication more palatable to pop audiences. This seemed to arise from a time when Cash’s overt attempts at success had already been made, and having used up those commercial ideas he tended to just kind of go with the flow in more eclectic settings — a bit like small-scale Nashville versions of the great Los Angeles “Wrecking Crew” recordings from the 1960s. The homegrown character of a guy who managed to maintain a successful music career through the rest of his life on “his” terms still shines through in an effortless kind of way. It all works pretty well. Cash does seem just a little stiff in places though, and some listeners don’t seem to care for the backing vocals. But when in later years he swapped the male backing vocals for female ones from his future wife June Carter and members of The Carter Family, things settled into the form that worked so well on many albums to come.

When it comes to the songs, a lot deal with death, but more importantly they conjure up Americana themes a lot like the view of pre-industrial America later featured in the film Days of Heaven. Cash avoids too many romance songs and manages to focus on farm and country life without any hint of rural naiveté. This might be called the first concept album he did, though the concept is pretty mild. The opener “Drink to Me” is an adaptation of the old English song “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes” (which was based on a 1616 poem by Ben Jonson derived from Greek verses by Philostratus). On the posthumously-released Personal File Cash revealed that it was the first song he ever performed publicly, for a high school event. It also was the song the little owlet Owl Jolson didn’t want to sing in the classic 1936 Merrie Melodies cartoon by Tex Avery “I Love to Singa.” “I Want to Go Home” is also an adaptation, of “The John B. Sails,” which would be performed with greater success by The Beach Boys as “Sloop John B” on Pet Sounds a few years later.

Most listeners will probably want to head to other Cash recordings first, and come back to this if they like his early 60s material to see how he arrived there. This one is still pretty welcoming, suitable for repeat listens, and really one of the more durable albums of Cash’s whole career. It isn’t just an offering from the “Johnny Cash” persona. It comes closer to revealing the guy who created the persona of “Johnny Cash” than anything else to this point, and even much of what came later.

Johnny Cash – Johnny Cash With His Hot and Blue Guitar

Johnny Cash – Johnny Cash With His Hot and Blue Guitar Sun LP-1220 (1957)

Johnny Cash was an artist who sort of arrived with all his major talents intact right from the beginning. His music evolved and changed over time, for sure. But his velvety bass-baritone voice and endearing brand of time-worn country wisdom are all in full effect on this, his first full-length LP. Being the early days of the LP format, this material wasn’t strictly recorded for the LP and many of these songs were previously released as singles. They were recorded between May 1955 and August of 1957. Cash plays with guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant, the original Tennessee Two. It’s a very spare and minimalist sound, which lets Cash’s inimitable voice take the spotlight. Perkins was a guitarist of pretty limited means. He really couldn’t play much more than a simple boom-chicka-boom rhythm, without any complex solos to speak of. He does a lot of the typical country strumming, alternating between low notes and high notes in the style of Maybelle Carter. But it’s iconic. Perkins was the perfect guitarist to support Cash. His playing has a little bit of rock influence, but that just provides a little, subtly energetic, minimally urban counterpoint to Cash’s traditional country leanings. The other key aspect of the sound of this record is the reverb. Like much of the music recorded at the legendary Sun Studios in Memphis Tennessee, the reverb drenches the music in seductive, politely dangerous charisma.

The songs here are great. They include Cash’s first hit, “Cry! Cry! Cry!,” a Hank Williams tune, “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle,” and a song probably written by Charles Noell about a 1902 train wreck, “The Wreck of the Old ’97.” “I Walk the Line” was a song Cash liked to say was his best, and it’s hard to argue. Another of his most famous compositions, “Folsom Prison Blues,” was written after Cash saw the film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison while in the U.S. Air Force stationed in Germany. He pretty liberally borrowed the melody and lyrical structure of Gordon Jenkins‘ “Crescent City Blues” (part of “The Second Dream – The Conductor” from Gordon Jenkins’ Seven Dreams (A Musical Fantasy)), and paid Jenkins in the 1970s for what he borrowed. He also adapted the famous line “I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die” from Jimmie Rodgers‘ “Blue Yodel (T for Texas)“: “I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma/just to see her jump and fall.” (Rodgers’ song in turn was a pastiche drawn from numerous sources). But Cash’s song is superior to any of its reference points. “I Was There When It Happened” is a country gospel number. Cash wanted to perform gospel music from the beginning, but opportunities were limited to record it in the early days. It would remain a factor in his music for his entire career.

What made Cash so special is damn hard to put your finger on. He sang about a lot of the ordinary aspects of life: work, travel, liberty, death, religion. He did do romance and love songs, but a lot less than many other famous singers. When he did do them, they weren’t anything like the hyper-sexualized fare that came to dominate rock music. There was a connection to the “old weird America” that Greil Marcus described with respect to Harry Smith’s iconic Anthology of American Folk Music. Cash’s songwriting, as well as his song selection, tended to emphasize an “ordinary” individual’s reaction to extreme situations: being confined to prison, natural disasters, threats to making a living, and so on. He confronted these situations with varied amounts of humor, lament, determination, dignity and enthusiasm. Yeah, Cash could take these situations and make them fun and funny. But that’s just the way his music reflected how human being sometimes deal with stress and tragedy, and what they aspire to in the best of times.

Cash only stayed at Sun Records for about three years. Sun continued to release his recordings for years after he left, in part because Cash left for a bigger label before his Sun contract was finished, forcing him to do a few contract-fulfillment recording sessions after he announced his departure. Although this album sounds unmistakably of its time, it doesn’t really sound “dated” at all, in the sense of losing its appeal to modern audiences. This is one of the essential Cash albums. There is not a bad track on the whole thing.