Travis Tritt and Marty Stuart mounted their challenge to headgear hegemony earlier this year on their “No Hats” tour; Tritt takes another shot on his new album, “t-r-o-u-b-l-e.” Bracketed by homages to Elvis (the title song, a hit for Presley in 1975) and bluesman Buddy Guy (“Leave My Girl Alone”), the album flouts the prim tidiness of much of country’s new traditionalism. Tradition, Tritt’s music says, is where you find it: in the blues, in rock, in Southern boogie. If Brooks is new country’s sensitive sex tornado, Tritt, 29, is the masculine primitive: a tough guy one minute, lovey-dovey the next. There’s nothing here as scathing as his 1991 hit, “Here’s a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares).” But when the band jams on Guy’s blues, or Tritt hangs his heart on his sleeve on “I Wish I Could Go Back Home,” this music is all it promises to be: tough, passionate, lonely.
On the opening cut of “This One’s Gonna Hurt You,” Marty Stuart ascends to hillbilly heaven, where Saint Peter Hank Williams round. “Right now country music’s got more singers than I believe I’ve ever seen,” he tells Hank’s immortal soul. “But I feel different…‘cause I’m a natural born cat / I’m country to the bone, but I don’t wear no hat.” This collection is less an album than an argument. Stuart, 33, is the real McCoy, and if you don’t believe it, wait until the next song, and he’ll tell you again. He has the right pedigree: as a teenager he played in Lester Flatt’s ensemble and later with Johnny Cash. What he doesn’t have is a distinctive voice or-save the title song, a duet with Tritt –exceptional songs. This album is full of fire and dirty electric guitar. But once he builds his impressive hillbilly fortress, he has little with which to furnish it. And in his orthodoxy, he is as circumscribed as the hat acts he disparages.
also finds heaven on her fourth album, “Come On Come On.” Tempting fate on the song “I Feel Lucky,” she wins the lottery and gets to pick her own paradise: “Dwight Yoakam’s in the corner trying to catch my eye / Lyle Lovett’s right beside me with his hand upon my thigh.” Carpenter, 34, a singer-songwriter with a precious streak (some blame her Ivy League education, some just blame her) keeps her self-conscious poesy in check here, neatly drawing unsung heroines fighting everyday fights: the dutiful wife who falls out of love, the lover who demands more. Hers are women caught between Hillary’s modernity and Tammy’s sense of duty.
Hat act Clint Black mines similar domestic ground on “The Hard Way,” his third album. Black, 30, has been Brooks’s chief rival. But in the last year, he married blond TV actress Lisa Hartman and sued his manager, neither act likely to win favor with country audiences. When the Country Music Association announced its award nominees last week, Black got shut out of the major categories. “The Hard Way,” a relaxed and sweetly swinging meditation on love, is a deceptively bitter pill. Caught between infatuation and heartbreak, Black wanders through these songs uncommitted, turning over one false hope after another. “We both had found the one we want,” he sings, “But found the one we wanted just quit trying.” It’s a clever line, but cold comfort. Black and his crack band give it the soft sell, letting you discover the poison for yourself.
59, rose to stardom in the ’70s on maudlin “countrypolitan” hits like “Behind Closed Doors” and the gooey “The Most Beautiful Girl.” But there was always another side to him. Raised on gospel, jazz and blues, baptized in the rockabilly of Sun Records in the ’50s, Rich was adept at any idiom he put his piano or bottomless voice to. On “Pictures and Paintings,” he drops the strings and plays the breadth of his roots, from standards like Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” to august originals like his heart-rending “Feel Like Going Home.” Recorded with a minimum of fuss, these dignified, sad songs aren’t country; they’re American chamber music.
JOHN LELAND
hasn’t changed his rugged, pared-down band sound much over the years, and his voice still has that weird tension between homespun and hammy that makes you wonder who he is under that outlaw persona. (Now a recovering-outlaw persona.) What’s changed is the business: true, Waylon (like Willie) had to lurk around Austin awhile before being accepted in Nashville, but these days a singer so eccentric and individual could never get a record deal. All the more reason to savor “Too Dumb for New York City, Too Ugly for L.A.” Its fusion of rock and country sensibilities is organic rather than calculated for airplay, and his “Hank Williams Syndrome” is a tough-minded corrective to uncritical Hankolatry: “I still love your music,” he sings, but “it’s no thanks to you / that I’m still living today.”
Capitol recordings, especially from 1959 through 1966, are among country music’s indispensable masterpieces–and the canny Owens, 63, who owns the rights, sat on them for years. The new three-CD set, “The Buck Owens Collection (1959-1990),” is what we’ve been waiting for: the original Bakersfield Sound, pure country that was as lean and mean as the best rock and roll. Here’s Don Rich’s raunchy lead guitar, the pedal steel of Ralph Mooney and, later, the sublime Tom Brumley-and Buck himself, no singer’s singer like George Jones, but with as much heart and soul. Here’s “Together Again,” “Under Your Spell Again,” “My Heart Skips a Beat,” “Cryin’ Time”–well, it goes on. Like most three-CD sets, this one starts to crap out midway through Disc Two (odd exception-. a stirring “Bridge Over Troubled Water” from 1971) yet still sins by omission (“Don’t Let Her Know,” “Heart of Glass”). With that Disc One, no big deal.
The master Tex-Mex accordionist Flaco Jimenez, 53, has been a favored collaborator of rootsy rockers for two decades-and lately, of cutting-edge country singers. Both types turn up on “Partners”: Dwight Yoakam, John Hiatt, Linda Ronstadt, Los Lobos, Ry Cooder … the usual suspects. This, even more than his albums with the Texas Tornados, is Flaco for Gringos. He plays splendidly (what else is new?), gets two lead vocals, sings harmonies-and the rest is dicey. Yoakam aces Warren Zevon’s junkie lament “Carmelita”; but Emmylou Harris is predictably affectless on Butch Hancock’s “West Texas Waltz” and Stephen Stills, covering his own “Change Partners” is, predictably, unlistenable. Jimenez himself has sung better: compare this “Eres Un Encanto” with the one reissued on the 1991 “San Antonio Soul,” the intro to Flaco you should own.
DAVID GATES
