My brother Kent tells the story that he realized our family elders weren't hopelessly square when, as a teenager, he discovered a Bob Wills record in an uncle's collection. I'm not sure how my brother knew that Bob Wills was cool. After all, our tastes were typical of teenagers at the end of the sixties. Rock was in and we wouldn't be caught listening to country, except for Johnny Cash, but he didn't count. But somehow he (and I) knew Bob Wills was cool.
Which leads me to praise George Strait, who has drawn on, revitalized, and renewed the honky tonk and Western Swing traditions. Strait is not a Western Swing revivalist in the vein of Ray Benson's Asleep at the Wheel. My sense is that Strait is under-appreciated by non-country fans. I've just got his 1995 4-CD box set Strait Out of the Box. It richly deserves its 5 star rating from Allmusic. The only problem with the box set is that Strait has recorded 13 years of music since then and now on-and-off country fans like myself have to figure out how to easily catch up on that period in his great career. I guess George Strait is a country artist that even people who aren't country should listen to.
I've known that Charlie Haden is cool for a long time. He was the bassist on Ornette Coleman's revolutionary free jazz Atlantic albums in the early 1960s. He's recorded in a variety of jazz idioms and settings--from the politically charged Liberation Music Orchestra and Not In Our Name, to Haunted Heart (lyrical mainstream small group of Quartet West) to duos (Steal Away an album of African American spirituals with pianist Hank Jones).
Now Haden has done something entirely different--a country CD. Not country-twinged jazz or some hybrid. But straight out country. Rambling Boy is not even contemporary country, the music harks back to an older time, circa 1930s-1940s. Haden grew up in a family that was sort of a Midwest Carter family, making a radio debut at age two.
Here's what Allmusic says
Saying that Charlie Haden's Rambling Boy is a personal album is an understatement. In essence, this album is a tribute to his mother and father whose own vocal group -- made up of Haden and his siblings -- performed on radio programs in both Shenandoah, IA and Springfield, MO, where they hosted the live variety show Korn's-A-Krackin (sic), which was modeled on the Grand Ole Opry. Haden began his musical career at the age of two, singing live on the radio; he was fortunate enough to have Mother Maybelle Carter play in his living room, and to have met the rest of the Carters, Porter Wagoner, Chet Atkins, and numerous others on their way through town to play the show.
This 19-song set features all the members of his immediate family -- daughters Petra, Rachel, and Tanya, as well as son Josh. The players and vocalists are numerous but they include guitarist Pat Metheny, Rosanne Cash, Vince Gill, Bruce Hornsby, Stuart Duncan, Jerry Douglas, the Whites, Sam Bush, Ricky Skaggs, Elvis Costello, and Russ Barenberg, among others. Despite the wide range of players here, this album can only be called Americana in the strictest sense of the term as its selections are new readings of mostly traditional folk and country songs. There are numerous connections interwoven here too: highlights include Cash's moving and plaintive reading of "Wildwood Flower," a song that has roots in her own family -- via Mother Maybelle -- and Haden's, as well, as his mother had it in her repertoire. Metheny's and John Leventhal's guitars are devastatingly beautiful here
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