Related articles and links |  1 of 3

State of Grace
Pierce Pettis
Compass Records

Crossing Muddy Waters
John Hiatt
Vanguard Records

It's hard to know what to make of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack winning the Country Music Association's 2001 album of the year—much less its Grammy—given that the liner notes of the CD blast away at the country music industry with such calculated aim. We learn that country music has become simply "watered-down pop/rock with greeting-card lyrics"; it specializes in "cultivated hothouse blooms that flaunt their colors on radio stations from coast to coast." That's not the sort of scorched-earth rhetoric that usually wins the applause of the attacked.

And yet applaud they did, shamed into it, perhaps. The soundtrack, under the direction of producing and songwriting demigod T-Bone Burnett, sought to capture the "original country sound" in a way that would winsomely render the beauty and power of music that more and more comes across, tellingly, as "ethnic." Burnett attracted a remarkable collection of musicians, ranging from living legend Alison Krauss (boasting ten Grammies), who leads an angelic choir in "Down to the River to Pray," to Ralph Stanley (billed as "The King of Mountain Soul"), who delivers a harrowing a cappella rendition of "O Death." The CMA was right: the record is a treasure, and after listening to it one is confronted with the obvious question: What is this? And what does it mean?

The very confusion over what to label this record and the musical world that it evokes—is it "Folk"? "Americana"? "Old-Time Music"? "Mountain Music"? "Southern Vernacular"? "Roots"? "Country"?—speaks of both a troubling cultural disarray and a salutary historical moment.

Most hearteningly, the "roots" phenomenon may signal a broadening readiness to embrace, in some fashion, what for most of the 20th century was an embarrassment to America's polite, educated, classes: the rural, regional, Protestant and Catholic world that the capitalist cosmopolitan 20th century nearly destroyed.

Nearly. It's one thing to destroy the body; it's another to destroy the soul. And it is the gradual dissolution of anything resembling a collective soul that has driven many Americans to search, hungrily, for hints and clues of an earlier one. Among those musicians leading that search, Pierce Pettis and John Hiatt, are among the most magnetic.

Pettis, a key figure in the "new folk" movement of the '80s and '90s, speaks in a gentle, meditative voice even at his most passionate.

Hiatt, an eclectic roots rocker, writes and sings with gritty, bluesy spontaneity. Both powerfully expose and transcend the flattened, abstracted, denatured worldview of 20th century cosmopolitans by, as Hiatt once put it, "listening to old voices/with a new ear" (Stolen Moments, 1990).

State of Grace is Pettis's most self-conscious attempt to center an album in his own roots. A native (and current resident) of northern Alabama, Pettis seeks to connect the spiritual reality of grace to his life in the Deep South; the two realms, he shows us in the title track, must not be severed.

Oh I wash my hands
And I take my place
Bow my head
And clean my plate
I think and act
And I talk this way
For I was raised
In a state of grace.

The song begins with Pettis softly playing the tune of Old One Hundredth (familiar to Christians who sing "Praise God from whom all blessings flow" at church) on an acoustic guitar, and ends with a lyrical fusing of Earth and heaven:

Oh I hear the call
Of the whippoorwill
As the moonlight falls
Over cotton fields
And if I should die
Before I wake
I will lay me down
In a state of grace.

next page... |  1 of 3

April 1 2002, Vol. 46, No. 4