Countryman (2005)

Why did it take ten years to release this album? The songs were recorded in 1996 and 1997, but this album didn’t come out till 2005. Don Was produced this reggae album, which the back of the CD claims “merges the gospel and soul spirit found in both reggae and country.”

“Do You Mind Too Much If I Don’t Understand” has that wonderfully wry rhetorical questioning feel. Do you mind too much if I don’t understand why you left me and treated me like trash. The politeness is so surprising.

“How Long is Forever” this time? It’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” all over again. “And you’d be welcome here within my arms forever even if forever ends for me today.” Willie will take one moment of forever, one glimpse, one taste. It could be a heartbreaking song, but even with the twangy steel, the bouncy reggae beat makes it hard to be sad.

Johnny Cash’s “I’m a Worried Man” is better on the live acoustic Storytellers album. How can you be sad or worried while singing or listening to reggae? How can you be worried or sad while smoking dope? Or singing reggae while smoking dope (is there any other way)? These would seem to make you doubly unable to be blue.

“The Harder They Come” was reissued on the 2009 Lost Highway compilation (reviewed in an earlier blog). The driving train whistle harmonica and the female back-up chorus make this one memorable.

Willie’s vocals on “Something to Think About” are as strong and tender as ever, but I’m still not sure how I feel about mixing the bouncy reggae beat with the mournful steel guitar. Seems sacrilegious or disrespectful somehow. Making light of suffering, fiddling while Rome burns or the Titanic sinks.

Okay, so I have to admit my initial judgment was wrong. “Sitting in Limbo” works. I completely dismissed this album out of hand based on my first listen. It helps, though, knowing most of these songs already so I can appreciate the way these reggae versions play with the original. Willie, of course, is sitting in limbo outside of time. In the waiting room of hell. Where would Dante put old Willie?

Willie has done “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” in so many different ways on so many different albums with so many different bands and vocalists that even this reggae version becomes more interesting as it joins the evolving life of this 40 or 50 year-old song.

Producers come and go, but two things are constant: Willie’s vocals and Mickey Raphael’s harmonica.

“One in a Row” gets at the recurring theme of lies. Why do we believe them? Why do we prefer them to the truth? “One in a Row” seems to be the inverse of the forever songs.

The do-wop reggae back-up vocals on “I’ve Just Destroyed the World Today” seem wrong and blasphemous. I’m not sure how he wants us to take this. It is interesting and I respect his willingness to blend genres, but I wonder if it belittles the lyrics, as if they don’t really matter. Sort of like people in church caring more about the quality fo the music than the words.

Time figures prominently in almost all of these tunes. These versions will be especially interesting to hear side-by-side with the Crazy demo sessions and the various other versions.

Can you be disrespectful to your own songs? What other artists have stayed with their own songs so long? Others, like Billy Joel and Miles Davis and Paul Simon, move on and get into other things, and Willie does, too, in his way. But true to his home/road tension he moves on by redoing his original songs. He has it both ways—innovation and tradition.