Top Ten Country Singles Of 2006: 1. Big & Rich: "8th Of November" 2. Anne McCue: "Coming To You" 3. Brain Surgeons NYC: "1864" 4. Rosanne Cash: "House On The Lake" 5. Ashley Monroe: "Satisfied" 6. Lari White: "Stinky Socks" 7. Dixie Chicks: "Not Ready To Make Nice" 8. Toby Keith: "A Little Too Late" 9. New Heathens: "Kansas Romeo" 10. Brain Surgeons NYC: "Lonestar"

Top Five Country Reissues Of 2006: 1. John Lee Hooker: Hooker (Shout! Factory) 2. Steve Goodman: Live At The Earl Of Old Town (Oh Boy) 3. Various Artists: Heartworn Highways (Shout! Factory) 4. Black Sage: Jack's Corner (Carpet Cat) 5. Various Artists: Classic Country: Sweet Country Ballads (Time Life)

Country Music's Three Best Male Vocalists Of 2006: 1. Willie Nelson

Country Music's Three Best Female Vocalists Of 2006: 1. Jessi Colter 2. Emmylou Harris 3. Dolly Parton

Country Music's Three Best Live Acts Of 2006: 1. Willie Nelson 2. Dolly Parton 3. Solas

Country Country Music's Three Best Songwriters Of 2006: 1. Chris Smither 2. Jessi Colter 3. Willie Nelson

Country Music's Three Best Duos, Trios, Or Groups Of 2006: 1. Solas 2. Shooter Jennings & The 357s 3. Cowboys From Hell

Country Music's Three Best Instrumentalists Of 2006: 1. Winifred Horan, fiddle (Solas) 2. Jon Graboff, steel guitar (Ryan Adams & The Cardinals) 3. Willie Nelson, guitar

Country Music's Three Best New Acts Of 2006: 1. Ashley Monroe 2. Sunny Sweeney 3. Carrie Underwood

Country Music's Three Best Overall Acts Of 2006: 1. Jessi Colter 2. Willie Nelson 3. Lone Official

Comments: Jessi Colter, whose early songs are credited to Margaret Eddy, from when she was married to Chuck's Uncle Duane, emerged for me, a little bit in the lemon-scented penumbra of her first and biggest Jessi hit, "I'm Not Lisa," and much moreso on the expanded reissue of Wanted: The Outlaws, but was and is still a reserved journeyman. An artist of poise and potential, a masterful student. Out Of The Ashes is a startling breakthrough, yet she seems shadowy, not furtive or coy, just driving her low, rumbling keyboard over high, rocky desert roads. Just like a woman, or some of 'em, no matter how much she tells you, there's a fair, if implied, warning, that there's a lot more where that came from, and a lot of it may stay Over There. For instance,there's a brief, vividly allusive, yet elusive critique of a certain outlaw, but in passing, as he's passing. She seems wise to have waited this long after Waylon's death to record again, to have gained perspective, but she doesn't dwell on it, except insofar as her home seems in motion: "His Eye Is On The Sparrow" and "Rainy Day Women" aren't the best performances, but they both move along at their and her own chosen speed, and they're both equally emblematic of her sensibility (And His eye surely must have noticed how they stone ya, counted by every one of Shooter's drumbeats on the collaboration originally commissioned by M-M-Mel Gibson for the companion album to The Passion Of The Christ, and must also have noticed that this sweatlodge session abjures the exploitational aspects of the stone-Ya in The Passion, or the similar sequence in On The Waterfront, while being scarier than either, just because of such unblinking austerity). Sorry to do this, but running out of time: for more on Jessi and Shooter , see "Honey Don't Put The OO Back in Umlaut! Shooter Jennings Makes Retro His Own Thing," archived at  https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2006/05/honey-dont-put-oo-back-in-umlaut.html 

Chatham County Line's Speed Of The Whippoorwill is non-nasal metagrass (if I move as quickly as they do, mebbe can survive retaliation for such a phrase). Migratory, sometimes fugitive Southerners, chasing the right job, running from the wrong one, or sometimes both, like the miner who gets into show biz by steering the coat tails of his prodigious (or at least well-disciplined) kids, but finally his fear of their failure, and his own return to the mines, is too great, and he takes their money and runs, pursued by CCL, with just the right, well-aimed mixture of coldness and compassion, of justice. (Also please see my feature on them, "Both Sides Of The Line," archived at http://www.charlotte.creativeloafing.com)(And what I wrote about Kid Pan Alley: Nashville, and Lari White's "Stinky Socks," you can read when I archive it at papercomet) 

Chris Smither, Leave The Light On: Smither, whose "Love Me Like A Man" and "I Feel The Same" were right at home on two of Bonnie Raitt's (and the '70s') best albums, Give It Up and Takin' My Time, reminds me that Allen Ginsberg said "Beat" came from "Man, I'm beat," and from "beatitude" also, and Smither's got his own sense of hard won grace. Not that he talks about it that way, but he lives it in his music, often enough. Def the folkier blues, though obsessive in a country way; can well imagine him on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal with Fred Neil nigh on forty year ago(though his own route was basically from New Orleans to Cambridge), but no time for mellow crinkles, he's even more like Nick Nolte in North Dallas Forty, the old pro athlete who's gotta get up every morning and pretty literally put himself back together again. He does know how to do this, and the music is fluid, pickin' like those critters and other objects swimming in the floodwaters of O Brother, Where Art Thou? But the voice and the words are unsettled, always sorting themselves out (as are the pickers, but the other elements are always catching up)(although he's got good company, swimming around down, there, like the backup voices of Olabelle, at times: a serendipitous simulation of field recording magic, overall.)(Although the waltz version of "Visions Of Johanna" is hideous filigree.) "Father's Day" is one of the most lucidly scary songs ever: he's enough of a father and of a son and an artist for that. Also, "Johanna" aside, got covers that suit him well, from Peter Case and Mississippi Fred McDowell. (Voice now is like Tom Waits' was on Closing Time; well, kind of between that and Nolte's!)(If he can remind me of Waits, without turning me off, he's really got some stage presence). 

Someone else who overcomes objections, in this case even when I don't want him to, is Willie Nelson. Sounds like he may be reading the words to half the songs on Songbird for the first time, even the ones he wrote himself. But it works well enough, considering the way his voice and his guitar cue the steel guitarist, and the rest of The Cardinals, and even when he leadeth them to squash "$1000 Wedding," he puts the nightmarish lyrics across like he's umpiring a public atrocity, which he is, of course. "Stella Blue" could be unbearably poignant when sung by its composer, Jerry Garcia; Willie uses just enough time release of tiny pain pills to lure me in. And he nails "Hallelujah," even better than L.Cohen, who sounds even flatter than Willie, who really knows how to rhyme the title with "What's it to ya?" Several other A tracks, but yes, basically it's a rehash of material he's done before, and even his approach to"Amazing Grace," tilting it into the tune of "House Of The Rising Son," has already been done by The Blind Boys Of Alabama, though the arrangement must be different, 'cos it's credited to Ryan Adams. But Songbird's got the overall momentum that You Don't Know Me doesn't, quite. No way is his version of the latter's title track not left in the dust by Ray Charles, while the Songbird tracks that beg comparison also pass their tests. Also: who cares? This stuff works! As a guilty pleasure, anyway. And yeah, much more of a guilty pleasure than is

 Rebel Meets Rebel, which is presided over by David Allan Coe, as to the country metal manor born, and the Panterans have also found their true home, in whatever bar or barn or skidmarks may adorn Cat Scratch Highway (the country metal Brigadoon I want to swallow Montgomery Gentry's "Slow Ride In The Fast Lane," helping to slim MG's new set to its better half, and prove its title, Some People Change).

 Lone Official is a one trick pony, but one that keeps finding new ways to go from a suspended lope to rippling explosions: as country as their race hoss muses. 

Oakley Hall, bearing the same name as the Western novelist admired by Thomas Pynchon, and the same name as the novelist's visionary playwright son, who seems to be steadily, amazingly recovering from fearsome brain injury, over the course of thirty years, is now also a solid band of pioneers, forcing themselves to plunge ever deeper into the poison glow of the wilderness, flagellant poetry in motion, at least when their guitars are in full cry. But they aren't always. They know how to ease up sometimes. Which gives them more energy to get themselves in even deeper, to "House Carpenter," where "those hills are murder."

 My New Year's resolution is to find something interestingly bad to write about (no, not interestingly bad to write, I got that covered). Let's start early with Wayne Hancock's '06 release, Tulsa. His persona here, even more than usual, is that of somebody who's made himself come out of the wilderness (might be a descendant of Oakley Hall's cousin, not quite a direct line). He's come to town, looking for some fun. Not all fun, not big fun, and nothing too weird or wildernessy, just the normal stuff that normal farmers and cowhands and townies take for granted. His voice is marked by thirst and maybe strain, but also it's naturally kinda high and thin; he's comfortable with that, and used to turning over every rock bottom of depression to get where he has to, or, in this case, wants to go, to see those bright lights tonight. And he's arrived somewhere, but these lights are dimmer than Hancock's willpower. This may well not be his band's fault. Judging by No Depression's description of a session, for a track on an earlier, equally frustrating (and perhaps frustrated) album. WH lambasted the players, because the song is "starting to sound like Elvis, and I hate Elvis!" So maybe the desert's in him too deep to shake, but still he proves he has star power, by letting it trickle through the dust. 

Oh yeah, the singles: Brain Surgeons NYC sometimes do the urban country boogie, like they worked extended temp in the Dallas Schoolbook Suppository, lookin' at the world through a computer screen, like the rest of us, and, if Ross The Boss's leads didn't seem quite so trite quite so often, and if Al Bouchard gave up the mic more often to Deborah Frost, then Denial Of Death might well have made my Rock Top Ten. But even so, on "Lonestar," you get that Metal Brenda Lee is comin' on strong, and Lemmy Lee too, pert' near (still meaning her, def not Al). But Al's the Yankee boy proudly reporting for duty in "1864," and no less country for that. 

Big & Rich's "8th Of November" marches to a certain point in the wilderness, then goes round and round and round, a lost patrol hanging onto that fiddle like a helicopter. Will the last person out of Saigon turn out the light at the end of the tunnel? (Sorry, that's just something I saw written in the Men's Room at Maxwell AFB, a long time ago.) 

But far from such a mossy cliché, is The New Heathens' "Kansas Romeo." The New Heathens are very influenced by The Drive-By Truckers, especially the way Patterson Hood's dry little cigarette voice sometimes squeezes as many words as possible into a bar line, then keeps on giving. But if I were assembling my own personal Deluxe Edition of Southern Rock Opera, I'd slip "Kansas Romeo" in with the best tracks from actual Truckers albums. Drawing on journalistic sources, it carefully details the story of a kid from a low-income family, pegged as borderline, in ethnic "mix" and I.Q., who ended up in a prairie group home, fell in love, but "stopped as soon as he was asked." Nevertheless, he's last seen in a prison cell, praying for forgiveness. As the situation is described here, it seems likely that he would have been charged with statutory rape, at most, if he hadn't loved "another Romeo, instead of a Juliet." How many times has this happened? Only once, in any song I've ever heard or heard of. It's not much shelter, but I hope the guy in the song hears it someday, sounding like one thing more than his own lonely voice. 

Oops, the Reissues: Certainly in terms of obsessiveness with the finer things in life ,and with some other things as well, and of the resourcefulness, which is part of the obsessiveness, John Lee Hooker is country, don't you think? Maybe not twisted enough, judging by Hooker, the box set, but close enough. Hooker prowls through all the one-man band sides he recorded under various names; that's just one of its missions. And the one-man-band consists of various effects of voice, guitar, and foot, no cymbals or other fancy hookups required. Of all heavy friends on the final disc (each of whom finds his own foothold, and his own release), Robert Cray is the one who emulates and builds on the inflections of Hooker's voice (and those other elements).Cray's probably noticed that, by this point in the saga, The Hook's stutter, for instance, has been demonstrated as a way to pick up women. (What the heck, it sounds sounds as plausible as any other approach.) 

Steve Goodman's Live At The Earl Of Old Town features Jethro Burns on mandolin, appropriately enough, considering Goodman's twists on Homer and Jethro's own smoothly skewed sensibility. Oh, everything's real tuneful and chirpy, with covers of "Red, Red Robin," "Rockin' Robin," and "I'll Fly Away." But we also get the exultation of towing "service" pirates of insatiable greed (based on a true Chicago enterprise, a company named Lincoln, of course, set those pirates free!). And ugly, funny, scary ditties by Shel Silverstein, and Steve's own account of an H&Jesque innocent , checking out that there NYC meat market, and even his also self-writ "City Of New Orleans" sounds stained here, and overall, Goodman, who worked his way through college penning jingles and singing at the folkie-legendary Earl, while beginning to deal with the condition that tracked his 15-year career, earns (and tips our way) the self-awarded halo of Cool Hand Leuk, one more time. (Although I haven't heard SG's other live sets, and Xgau told he gives this one an Honorable Mention, but he loves the live disc of Goodman's No Big Surprise anthology, and if that really is so much better than this, well so much the better indeed.)

¶ 1/26/2007