2010-04-07 11:50:49

PETER BLACKSTOCK: A Few Thoughts On The Life, Death And Resurrection Of American Roots Music

Filed under: Alejandro Escovedo, Bob Dylan, Calexico, Emmylou Harris, Featured, Johnny Cash, Music, Neko Case, No Depression, Old 97's, Peter Blackstock, Son Volt, The Purple Interview, allison moorer
Posted by: John

What does the future hold for American roots music? In the following Purple Interview, No Depression co-founder and editor Peter Blackstock gives us his take. Though the magazine that he started is gone, the music he loves survives and thrives, even under adverse conditions.

Lately, we’ve been lucky to have Peter as our new music columnist, but we never really gave him a proper introduction to our readers, so here goes, a rerun of an interview in which he lays out the state of the art.

The best introduction to the magazine is the No Depression archive, a trove of coverage on an extraordinary era in American music, when the greats of the past, like Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Solomon Burke, Loretta Lynn and Emmylou Harris made records with and inspired a new generation of younger artists like Ryan Adams, Lucinda Williams, Jack White, Gillian Welch and Alejandro Escovedo. The music is there, but so are the stories, reported and written by some of the best in the business of music journalism (I admit. I wrote one, too, but wouldn’t count myself in that company).

You can check the archive out here at No Depression, which lives on as a website, and in the meantime hunker down for a chat with one of the great chroniclers of American popular music.

Peter, you and I have talked about the origins of the name “No Depression”. It sort of is and sort of isn’t related to the old Carter Family song, right?

It is directly related to that song, just channeled through more modern reference-points. The Carter Family song was covered in 1990 on the debut album by Uncle Tupelo (whose members later split into Wilco and Son Volt), and they used the song title as the album title as well. A few years later, in 1994, a discussion forum on America Online which started out as an Uncle Tupelo fan board ended up morphing into a more general alternative-country forum, and its patrons re-christened it “No Depression”. I became a regular visitor to that board in the fall of ‘94, and when Grant and I started talking about creating a roots-focused magazine the following spring, my sense was that the phrase “No Depression” had already begun to develop a certain identity-stamp among the more fervent followers of the music we were seeking to cover.

How did the original team that started the magazine come together? You, Grant Alden and Kyla Fairchild?

Grant and I founded the magazine in the summer/fall of 1995 (the first issue came out in mid-September of that year). He and I had worked together at a Seattle biweekly music publication called The Rocket, and had come to respect each other’s journalistic abilities. As we were putting together the first issue, Kyla (who neither of us really knew at that point) dropped off an advertisement for a local band she was managing, and asked if she might be able to help. She worked on distribution when that first issue hit the stands, and took over advertising a year later (when our original ad-rep left to become Whiskeytown’s manager). She became a partner in the business when we incorporated in 1998. (In the present-day, post-print incarnation of No Depression on the web, Kyla’s the majority owner, having bought Grant’s share; I’m essentially a minority silent-partner.)

Can you give a sense for what the music industry was like when you started the magazine back in 1995? Is it safe to say that it was a less volatile, slightly more predictable business? Or am I romanticizing?

I think it was volatile and unpredictable at that time too, but in different ways, and probably not as unstable at its very core as it is today. The key difference — and I think this has affected the publishing industry in pretty much precisely the same way as it has affected the music industry — is that the incredibly streamlined ease of information-exchange brought about by the digital age has ultimately (and somewhat ironically) served to devalue all creative works which can be rendered and transmitted in digital form. Whether the object in question is a song, or a manuscript, or a photograph, or a film — assigning it to a container-form which is effortlessly simple to distribute and display will almost inevitably have the side-effect of reducing its value. Stated simply, if something’s really easy to get, folks tend to think it’s not worth as much.

Your magazine helped to give a name to a particular genre of music, but that name was disputed ever after. What were the parameters of the genre? How did you define it in your own mind?

Grant and I always liked to say that we defined alternative-country by not defining it. When we started, we had more of a specific focus to what we would cover or not cover, in large part because the magazine was quite small early on (32 pages for our first issue, compared to 180 at our peak many years later). Less pages naturally meant a narrower focus. But as we grew, it seemed very obvious to us to push the horizons outward. If we started with the more specific notion of younger punk-rock-influenced artists drawing upon the classic-country traditions of previous generations, it was pretty easy to connect the dots to similar roots forms such as bluegrass and old-time folk, and inextricably related genres such as blues and jazz, and regional offshoots such as Cajun and western swing. It all made sense to us under a larger umbrella.

What brought about that particular moment when a group of musicians began to make enough of the same kind of music to give birth to a new sound? Or was it new?

I’d definitely contend that it wasn’t new, and I’ve no doubt that the artists themselves would concur. What has happened with these intersections of country and rock music is that they tend to repeatedly come and go over the decades, with a fairly regular ebb-and-flow, really. The late-’60s work of the Byrds and Gram Parsons and a handful of others is a fairly clear seminal point (and led directly to the SoCal country-rock boom of the early ’70s with the Eagles and such). Things came around again in the early ’80s in the wake of punk’s ascendance, with bands such as Jason & the Scorchers and X applying that music’s energy to roots traditions. When Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks and a few others started working similar turf around 1990, it was really just the cycle coming back around again. As it inevitably will continue to do in the future, far as I can tell.

Can you give us one or two of your most cherished memories in your years running the magazine?

One that definitely comes to mind is spending a long night’s journey into day walking the mile-or-so stretch of Hillsborough Street in Raleigh in the spring of ‘97 with Ryan Adams, stopping along the way at various spots such as Sadlack’s, the Rathskeller and the Comet to turn on the tape recorder and get interview dialogue for what became the ND #10 cover story on Whiskeytown. (If he ever talks you into going bowling, I’d recommend against allowing him to keep score.) … And in the fall of 2000, my friends Chris and Carla (from Seattle band the Walkabouts) drove with me from Seattle down to Springfield, Oregon, to hand-deliver a copy of a Mickey Newbury tribute album that Chris and I had produced to Newbury himself. We really expected to just say hello and drop it off — Newbury was rather ill at that point with smoking-related lung problems (and would be gone two years later) — but instead he invited us in and spent the entire afternoon talking to us about the craft and the art of songwriting. He recited lyrics to us and played songs for us on his guitar, even as the oxygen tubes which helped him breathe stretched across the living-room floor to a tank in his bedroom.

One or two of the greatest shows you ever saw?

There was a series of shows that Alejandro Escovedo did during the 1990s to close out South By Southwest at La Zona Rosa on Sunday night every year which may never be surpassed in my own memory. These “orchestra” performances featured around 15 musicians, including strings, percussion, horns and steel guitar; Escovedo’s emotional expressiveness, and his direction of the sonic maelstrom, was the kind of thing that put him in a league with the great bandleaders of that century, in my opinion. … And I still have a very vivid recollection of ND’s fourth-anniversary party at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle, when Buddy Miller headlined the show playing solo. He’d been in town to play at a big festival earlier in the day with Emmylou Harris, and halfway through his set at the Tractor, he was joined onstage by Emmylou for three songs — including “Don’t Tell Me”, which may be Emmylou’s greatest backing-vocal performance since her days with Gram.

One or two or even three records that stand out in your mind as exemplifying the best in the sound of American roots music?

Impossible to fairly narrow things down to three of course, and so I won’t by any means suggest that these are “definitive” selections in any way — but thinking about it in this particular moment, I’ll say Gram Parsons’ Return Of The Grievous Angel, T Bone Burnett’s 1986 self-titled album, and the Jayhawks’ Tomorrow The Green Grass. Ask me again in about five minutes, and I’ll give you three different answers, probably.

Why did you close shop?

Advertising took a precipitous nosedive in the early part of 2008, and we felt like we were seeing the writing on the wall; the concurrent or subsequent demise of not only other niche magazines (such as Harp, Bluegrass Now and Punk Planet) but even some very large music periodicals (Blender and Vibe) seems to have borne out our impressions of what was happening. Essentially the long-established business-model for music magazines has ceased to function; with both the publishing industry AND the music industry in phases of major upheaval and downsizing, there just does not appear to be any way to generate the income required to sustain things even on the very modest level at which we operated No Depression all these years. We never really lost readership in any substantial way — for most of the decade (including when we shuttered in 2008), we were around 30,000 circulation — but the shrinking ad-base (related not just to the present recession/depression, but to the fundamental changes in the media and music industries) made our business model unviable for the future.

Looking back at the state of the music industry when you started, what are the biggest changes?

The main thing is that I think it’s getting increasingly hard for artists to attain any sort of critical mass. In the mid-’90s, a big-selling album’s debut-week sales figures — say, Pearl Jam’s Vs. or a new Garth Brooks album — would be very near a million copies. Nowadays, artists such as the Arcade Fire or Neko Case can actually debut in the Billboard Top 5 — not because they’ve managed to break through to a level where they sell at those numbers, but because you can sell in the tens of thousands in your debut week and reach those kinds of lofty chart-positions now. That’s not really a problem for Arcade Fire or Neko Case — on the contrary, they can sustain themselves quite well at that level — but if that’s the HIGH end at this point, it means the middle to low ends have pretty much fallen off a cliff. In the past, neverminding the million-selling Madonnas and Guns N Roses and Green Days at the top of the charts, you could find real treasures amid the artists selling in the lower tens of thousands, from Steve Forbert to Syd Straw to Matthew Ryan, and those artists generally could get by all right (not rich, but sustainable). Nowadays, it just seems increasingly impossible for those mid-lower-level artists to support themselves with their music. Certainly a greater quantity of people are MAKING records now than ever before, but I feel certain that considerably fewer artists are able to avoid having at least part-time if not full-time day jobs.

What does the future look like for music journalism?

Almost EXACTLY the same as what I just outlined for the music industry above: The mid-lower-level journalists (essentially, everyone who’s not working for a Yahoo/MSNBC-level media conglomerate) better find another line of work. I’m not sure that there actually IS music journalism in the future; there is simply music commentary, by all manner of informed and uninformed sources, with almost no editing or oversight involved in the process. This may sound like I’m saying it’s all terrible, and I don’t really mean it that way — there are some advantages to this non-journalistic future, in certain respects — but I do think there are huge elements of the form which we take for granted that are being lost, and at this point there is not really any envisionable plan to save or revive those elements.

And the future for American roots music?

Well, that’s the good news — roots music itself with never fade or even wither. Regardless of the economic viability of art, it will ALWAYS be produced by creative types, whether they’re being compensated for their work or not. And American roots music is far too ingrained in the national cultural landscape to just disappear. I think that as a society we’ll have less common reference-points for the music’s identity — your favorite roots-music act may more likely become the band you can catch regularly at the club or coffeehouse across town, as opposed to the one you stumbled upon at the record store (R.I.P.), or read about in some magazine (adios), or heard on the cool radio station (good luck with that). Presumably there are MORE discovery outlets now, with MySpace and YouTube and message-boards out the wazoo, but we’ve pretty much jettisoned the gatekeepers at this point, and the result will be an audience that’s increasingly splintered rather than galvanized. Within that framework, though, songwriters will still write songs, players will still strum and pick and bow along, and voices will carry the music above and beyond the bounds of commerce. Of that, we can be assured.

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2009-02-10 15:41:46

THE YEAR’S MOST EXCITING DUET: ELVIS COSTELLO AND SIMON COWELL

Filed under: American Idol, Duets, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Music, Spectacle, Television
Posted by: John

Ah hell, why try to lie? I’ve watched American Idol again.

This time, it’s educational! Last week, I spent one hour with Simon Cowell while he destroyed the egos of the talentless and falsely elevated the hopes of the mildly gifted. Then I switched to a second hour of Elvis Costello’s new show Spectacle in which the greatest musicians in popular music talk about perseverance, relationships, musical knowledge and balls. Talent is the least of it.

On American Idol, we receive the impression that neither pop stars nor music have a past. Everything exists in a tense vaccuum of the present. A few of the contestants play instruments, and some are classically trained. A handful sound original. The best of them are able to carry a tune and bust an attitude. They are quintessential fireflies. For the most part, though, we think of them as special needs musicians. They are people who need to be stars, as if nothing else might be required to guarantee a life in music.

On Spectacle, we learn that everything these people believe about music is a lie, that raw talent only goes so far, that stardom is fleeting, that no one succeeds alone, that the musical past is definitive prologue to a real career. Whereas Simon Cowell presides over his universe like a dominatrix with an amused grin for the best goose-steppers, Elvis Costello comes off as the gentle omnivore who can swallow almost anyone, as long as they have paid their dues and aren’t insufferable. And, oh yes, he loves the musicians who never became stars and seems to take a special relish in singling them out.

The differences between the two shows may be obvious, but seeing them together underlines the ways that television now mediates popular music for us. American Idol was never about music. It was always about television stardom. .Spectacle is about music, and the people who practice that trade, whether opera singers or jazz pianists or singer songwriters. The show reminds us that for most artists, music is, in fact, a trade, and not a form of celebrity incubation.

I wait for the day when worlds collide, of course, when Idol producers ask Elvis to be a judge. Till then, I’ll just have to savor the juxtaposition. Tomorrow night, Jenny Lewis, M. Ward, Zoey Deschanel and Jakob Dylan are the guests and we can already imagine the possibilities of the collaboration. Will anyone rise to the level of Renee Fleming when she performed a stunning version of “In The Pines” with Elvis, Rufus Wainwright and Kate McGarrigle (or was it Martha Wainright?). How about the stunning moment when Rosanne Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Norah Jones, John Mellenkamp and Elvis sang Johnny Cash’s “Big River”? And “Seven Year Ache”?

Meanwhile, over at American Idol last week, an Osmond offspring got deep-sixed without so much as a tear during Hollywood week. I found that just as satisfying, in its own little way.

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2008-07-05 11:26:12

NO DEPRESSION: THE MUS-EPIC-AL!! (PART IV)

Filed under: Be Good Tanyas, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Calexico, Duets, Eilen Jewell, Emmylou Harris, Freakwater, George Strait, Golden Smog, John Doe, John Marks, Johnny Cash, Kathleen Edwards, Kris Kristofferson, Laura Cantrell, Led Zeppelin, Levon Helm, Los Lobos, Lucinda Williams, Maria McKee, Marshall Crenshaw, Merle Haggard, Music, Nick Lowe, No Depression, Old 97's, Shelby Lynne, Son Volt, Steve Earle, The Sadies, The Sadies, Tift Merritt, Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, X, allison moorer, jon dee graham
Posted by: John

Our saga continues. For those just arriving, I’m telling an epic story of American love, hate, death and survival through the medium of my favorite music in an effort to preserve the legacy of the great departed music magazine No Depression. For the latest in its on-line life, check out Peter Blackstock’s recent post on Northampton locals the Drunk Stuntmen. I haven’t seen Young At Heart, the movie in which they feature, but I caught their live act a while back and can attest to their glory. More people should know about them.

As most of its fans know, No Depression will resurrect in December as a bi-annual bookazine, but the transition marks the end of an era and offers a chance for an eccentric like myself to offer up a Mad Max vision of the music’s future. For an in-depth explication and rationalization of this fool’s exercise, you can start here.

And so back to our tale. Thus far, we find ourselves in central Kentucky, somewhere between Louisville and Appalachia, i.e. Kentucky, in a small town split between two factions, the Nash and Henry clans. The Rev. Jeremiah Nash storms from the pulpit of the Holy Gethsemane Church. Ben Henry sits behind bars of a federal pentitentiary. The two men hate each other, thanks to a murder case that swallowed the town whole. In a fight, Henry murdered one of Nash’s church members over a woman. Nash sways the town and therefore the jury against Henry, even though the man Henry killed had beaten his wife almost to death.

Years have passed, and the wounds have festered, but we also see hope of reconciliation. Catalina Nash, teenage daughter of the reverend, and Sugar Henry, equally teenage son of Ben Henry, meet in bar and fall in love. At first, they sneak around; it’s clear that the town won’t accommodate their love. Sugar’s ex-girlfriend Etta Place will stop at nothing to thwart the relationship. Meanwhile, Catalina’s stepbrother from her father’s first marriage, Jake Nash, has just returned from Baltimore and a failed marriage, and his semi-incestuous love for his stepsister will soon turn to rage.

18)“Until You Came Along”, The Golden Smog—Every time I hear this song, it makes me happy. It’s a perfect piece of pop craftsmanship from some No Depression giants, including Jeff Tweedy of Uncle Tupelo and Wilco and Gary Louris of the Jayhawks, and it has one of those hooks that start in the ears and ends up in the deep interior. It hits us like a sugar-coated bullet to the gut.

In our story, it’s the moment when Sugar Henry lets us know how deep his feelings go. He would rather die or leave home than give up Catalina Nash.

19)“The Road to Gila Bend”, Los Lobos—The catalogue of the Hidalgo Brothers is so rich and deep that I could have turned a dozen directions, but I knew I’d have to reach for one of their rock tunes, which have always managed that Springsteen feat of holding hope and despair in the same hot cup.

I can remember the record shop in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I bought their debut album Will The Wolf Survive?. I played the title track till it warped. I first saw Los Lobos in 1987 at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, Dave Alvin along for the ride, and it was a magical evening steeped in personal unhappiness, a night toward the end of a dying relationship. Twenty years later, I saw them again in Northampton, and it felt like a much happier family reunion. The same year I’d first seen them, after the other relationship had gone to its long home, I met my wife, and we’ve been together for two decades. So has the band.

In our story “The Road to Gila Bend” introduces more new characters, cousins of Marisol Nash, illegals who have crossed into the United States for work and are trying to find their lost family member. Back in Coahuila, her mother has died. Marisol gets word that they are in Texas, working lawns and slaughterhouses, and tells Catalina, unaware that her daughter is about to strike out for the territories. The Los Lobos song, off their more recent record The Town and the City is a gorgeous song about flight both to and from our hopes.

20)“Not the Tremblin Kind”, Laura Cantrell—Following a muse that has lured others before her, most recently Shelby Lynne, Laura Cantrell has just released a record in the spirit of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and the only disappointment is that we won’t hear more of her own original work. Cantrell has a rare gift. On two previous records, this New York DJ, host of the once indispensable Radio Thrift Shop, turned her exquisite musical taste into sweet, tough, gorgeous country tunes of her own. Her first record, Not The Tremblin Kind wandered through months of my life, and the title track has never quite faded from my mind.

In our story, Catalina Nash stands up to her father, who has just discovered the love affair. This song marks the great break between doting father and beloved daughter.

21)“Dias Y Noches Perdidas”, Freddy Fender—Wonderful news that the town of San Benito, Texas has given one of my musical heroes, a giant of conjunto, the late and lamented Freddy Fender, his own museum! In that spirit, I have to include one of the greatest of all country songs sung in Spanish by a man whose voice rivals that of Sam Cooke in its silky, sad texture. How many times have I sat in a darkened Broadway music hall and asked myself—why couldn’t someone just start to sing “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights?”

In our saga, Marisol Nash sings about her life, far from family, far from home, in the household of an increasingly angry man, her husband Jeremiah. She knows her daughter will leave, and she is thinking the same thing. Time to light out for Texas, where her cousins are waiting.

22)“The Beast in Me”, Nick Lowe—Did I first hear this song at the end of the Sopranos episode or did it really make an impression as sung by an aging Johnny Cash? One way or another, it is poetry about the divided soul, and it would be almost as beautiful without the music. Lowe’s song here on its own terms, but it seems right to me that an early punk champion of country music, someone who learned a lot from the practicioners of the classic Nashville songwriting, should be part of this cavalcade.

In our story, the song goes to Jake Nash, who unveils his murderous thoughts towards Sugar Henry and his wayward stepsister Cataline. He has discovered the affair and means to kill them both. “The Beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bonds, restless by day and by night, rants and rages at the stars.”

23)“Light Enough To Travel”, The Be Good Tanyas—Hello, Vancouver! These three women, criminally neglected folkies, gave me a reason to rethink “Oh Susanna”, and I’ve never said a proper thank you. Their first record offers one gem after another, the harmonies, the strings, the mournfulness. I love the moment in this song when one of the gals has to throw down her accordion to get away from the police.”Light Enough to Travel” is a song about the ability to move, as often as necessary, and the price of that movement.

In our story, Catalina sings it, and it’s about being young and getting the hell out of Dodge.

24)”Wedding Day”, Alejandro Escovedo—What’s more to say about one of the great singer songwriters of our time? He transcends any label. I’ve seen him in concert twice, once at the Iron Horse in Northampton, where he delivered one of the best musical performances I’ve ever seen. The man still looked a little fragile after his years of struggling with hepatitis, but my God the power of that show, like some hurricane blowing out of a dark corner of the bar. He’s already written a musical cycle, so it’s redundant of me to bring him into this mus-epic-al. Still, I have to. If I’d known about “Wedding Day” when I got married, I would have asked the band to play it at my wedding. Here’s my penance.

In our story, Sugar Henry and Catalina Nash get hitched, and he sings this song to her. We’re coming to the moment of departure, and once the two of them leave, they know, they will never be back, which brings us to…

25)“Windfall”, Son Volt—For as long anyone cares about this music, there will be arguments about Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar, the duo that gave Uncle Tupelo its distintive sound and then went on to found what may seem like separate nations. In fact, I can’t imagine either the pages of No Depression the magazine anymore than I can imagine the last fifteen to twenty years without the music of both of them. Between them, they tackled vast range of roots sounds, reinventing and rethinking to such an extent that it’s hard to go back to the original source material, whether the Carter Family or the Beatles, without hearing their musical descendants. For me, as much as I love Jeff Tweedy, Jay Farrar’s “Windfall” will always be the crowning achievement in song craft. At Tramps, in New York City, God rest its seedy soul, I saw Steve Earle cover the song, and he said beforehand “there’s real lonely in it”, a high compliment. I couldn’t live without this one.

In our story, it’s the accompaniment to the departure of Catalina Nash and Sugar Henry, just married, from their childhood home. Its lyrics talk about the freedom of the sadness of the road, but they also foretell the literal and figurative storms to come. This love will be tested.

26)“The Levee’s Gonna Break”, Bob Dylan—What do you want? There had to be Dylan, and I love this song, and I needed rain, so here it is. “I can’t stop here, I ain’t ready to unload, I can’t stop here, I ain’t ready to unload, Riches and salvation can be waiting behind the next bend in the road.” It’s one more doom-laden ride from the Modern Times record, and I can listen to it again and again. Bet there’s a Dylan musical in the works. I don’t care. The man has to be here.

A thought about the meaning of this enterprise of mine. Does anyone else here remember the moment in the Clinton presidency, before Nixon died, when all the presidents from 1968 forward were still alive? I recall a photo of the men in the New York Times, and I marveled at the living history represented in the image. It was Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Sr., and Clinton, more presidents than had ever been alive at the same time. Maybe the No Depression moment is nothing more than an extraordinary statement of living history. At one and the same moment, a very brief one, in the end, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Loretta Lynn, Ralph Stanley, Iris Dement, Beck, Neil Young, George Jones, Ruth Brown, Wanda Jackson, Solomon Burke, Gillian Welch, Son House, Jay Farrar, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Norah Jones, B.B. King, Tom Waits, Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens were all alive and performing at or near the top of their games. That alone would justify the movement, the magazine, the mus-epic-al.

In our story, as the chorus sings, we realize that a hurricane is coming, and the levees won’t hold. Is it any surprise? Katrina or one of her wild sisters makes an appearance. What epic of American life, particularly in this decade, would be complete without huge weather?

26)“Eastwinds”, The Sadies—Quite simply, one of the most haunting songs ever recorded. We hear spectral lyrics of death and destruction sung by Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin. This isn’t just spooky and pretty. It’s transcendent. The fact that most American music lovers have never heard this song is its own argument for the mus-epic-al.

In our story, “Eastwinds” is sung by a chorus, and it charts the arrival of the storm that will separate families. Sugar and Catalina have headed south and are near the Louisiana-Texas border when it strikes. They join of an army of refugees headed east. Hot on their trail, the Reverend Nash, Jake Nash and Etta Place are scattered to the winds.

27)“Wide River To Cross”, Levon Helm, Written by Buddy Miller and Julie Miller—I first read about this record in the pages of No Depression, and it was one more reason to be grateful for the magazine. Levon Helm’s voice had always been familiar from the Band era, but nothing really prepared me for this record. One of these days, when better times are here, I want to go see The Midnight Rambles in Woodstock, New York, that gathering of musicians around Daddy Helm. You might way my mus-epic-al was inspired in part by the idea of these evenings in celebration of a sound, a community and an era. God bless Levon Helm. Truly. “Wide River To Cross” has given me more comfort in the last year than most songs in a decade. And see? Buddy and Julie Miller are here, their songwriting geniuses rather than their voices.

In our story, the Rev. Jeremiah Nash sings “Wide River To Cross”, and we know that in this one moment, with this song, in the aftermath of the storm, he has become an old man. His rage at his child, and his foolhardy pursuit, have destroyed something in him, and he understands that his life will never be the same. He will never return to Kentucky, but he no longer knows where he will go. He sees himself as outcast.

28)“Walt Across Texas Tonight”, Emmylou Harris—When we hear the name Emmylou Harris, we don’t usually think of this song. It’s an obscure gem, and it shows a more joyful, less mournful side of one of the undisputed greats of the music here. Emmylou was a key artist for me, educating my musical sensibility through her assistance to others and through her incredible taste in songs. Among her many albums, my favoriote is the lesser-known Cimarron from the early 1980’s, and “Waltz Across Texas Tonight” strikes me as a song in the spirit of that remarkable record. Also, I needed an uplifting number to end Act One, for that’s where we are.

In our story, the lovers Sugar and Catalina have crossed into Texas, where they will begin a new life. Home lies behind, along with parents, lovers, brothers, an entire past blown apart by the storm. They are young, married and adventurous. Catie Nash sings this song to Sugar, and the curtain comes down.

NEXT: ACT II

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