Now playing...

Del and the Boys (Del McCoury Band, 2000)

It don't get much more country than this. I have sometimes winced at the so-called "high lonesome" sound of bluegrass music, and at the cliched images of "hillbillies" that too often accompany it in places like "Dollywood" or "Silver Dollar City". But against all expectations, I enjoyed this album immensely, and it reminded me that bluegrass has a far greater and deeper heritage than the cornball cliches of "Hee-Haw", one that I need to explore.

True, McCoury's voice at full blast has some of the sonic qualities of a high-speed bandsaw cutting through sheet metal, but so help me, it works on these songs. Although there's one instrumental number on the album, and Del's band (including his two sons) plays blazing licks throughout, most of the songs, like the traditional folk ballads and gospel songs that gave birth to the bluegrass genre, depend on the lyrics as much as the music for their impact. They're songs that tell stories drawn from the weird and phantasmagorical world of backwoods American folklore, where angels or devils can lurk behind the faces of strangers on trains or the temptations of the whiskey bottle, and McCoury's their ideal storyteller. As sung by McCoury, a song like "1952 Vincent Black Lightning", a rather tawdry tale of an ill-fated biker and his red-haired girlfriend, becomes high drama despite itself. Even slightly-over-the-top bits like the protagonist's fashion comments ("Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme!") and the dying words of a man who sees "angels on aerials / in leather and chrome / comin' down from Heaven / to carry me home" work amazingly well when belted out in McCoury's urgent backcountry twang.

Elsewhere in the album, "All Aboard"manages to bring one of the oldest tropes in the gospel-songwriters' book to vivid, nerve-jangling life, and "Pharisee in Recovery" manages to be both humorously self-deprecating and Biblically sound. The latter song, if I had my way, would be required listening for all church officials of all denominations.