Cold Mountain – Music From The Motion Picture (CD)

 

Sound: B     Music: B

 

 

Greil Marcus famously called it, “the old, weird America”, that dark, haunted America sung about in folk songs and gospel spirituals, in blues stomps and country yodels; a country of crossroads and barn dances, of deals bargained with the devil and strange encounters with God.  In this America, tall tales, shaggy dog stories, newspaper headlines, and Bible verses are all of equal import and all are true.  Out in the land roses grow from the breasts of murdered children while Jesus walks the backroads disguised as a carney-gospel vaudevillian, a dusty, bent banjo strapped to his back.

 

This America has been documented on countless forgotten 78 rpm records, you remember those spinning discs of scratchy shellac don’t you, and in the field recordings sponsored by the Smithsonian.  Artists such as the Carter Family, Bascom Lamar Lunceford, Doc Boggs, Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Gus Cannon, and so many others mapped this country in proud voices with the obsessive detail of government-employed cartographers.  But with the coming of Rock-N-Roll this vision of America faded into the background, only occasionally lifting its head when Bob Dylan took the stage, or when The Band hunkered down in the basement of Big Pink.  The Pop idiom seemed at a loss with what to do with these complex and downright bizarre songs.

 

Lately, though, that “old, weird America” has made a big comeback thanks mostly to a couple of soundtracks produced by T-Bone Burnett.  The O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack was such a massive commercial hit that it spawned a follow-up, live album Down From The Mountain and re-energized the career of Ralph Stanley.  Following those successes comes the soundtrack to the Civil War love story Cold Mountain.

 

Everything we’ve come to expect from those prior releases is on display here.  The somberly strummed guitars, the thoughtful banjo plucks, the austere fiddles, and the clean, unobscured vocals.  Instead of Gillian Welch’s pervasive presence throughout “O Brother” we get Jack White on five tracks of Cold Mountain.  Thus we’ve traded one talented young buck for another.  Also, rather than Ralph Stanley’s commanding resonant voice we’re given the dulcet heartbreaking lyricism of Alison Krauss. Needless to say it’s all very pretty and sometimes quite moving. But where’s the fire?  Where’s the passion?  Where’s the dirt of the North Carolina Mountains?

 

And that’s the problem.  It’s all a little too clean, a little too perfect.  The album is a museum piece, lovely and admirable but surrounded by velvet ropes that keep the listener at a safe distance.  Thank God for The Sacred Singers At Liberty Church!  The two tracks they contribute, “I’m Going Home” and “Idumea”, are a much needed corrective to the rest of the album.  These are truly tongues ablaze and hearts full-to-bursting.  This is swooning song, a great speckled bird of voice that lifts you and throws your body around, pulls at your ears and blasts you out into the heavens.  This is music that comes closest to the crazy wonders found in the grooves of those old 78s.  My hope is that T-Bone Burnett’s work here and elsewhere has provided the impetus for those unfamiliar with that great old-timey music to go digging through the Folk and Blues sections of their neighborhood record shops, pulling the CDs put out by Yazoo, Revenant, Dust-To-Digital, Smithsonian-Folkways and other labels dedicated to keeping this music in circulation.

 

Cold Mountain is a very fine collection of songs, one that I’ve enjoyed and played many times at my place of employment.  I can usually count on a few customers complimenting the music whenever it’s played.  And when they do I always suggest a few collections of music from the 1920s that I think they’ll enjoy even more.  There are endless roads to explore in that “old, weird America”, confusion and treasure at every crossroads, and those of us who have walked a few of those roads owe it to the music to hand over our partial maps to the young explorers who have just discovered the existence of that other country.

 

 

-   Kristofer Collins