Various - Disc of the day

Various
Heartworn Highways

(Loose, 2006)

2006 reissue of songs from Jim Szalapski’s now-legendary document of ’70s ‘progressive country’.

In 1975, director and writer Jim Szalapski set himself a task: to recast American country music in a landmark documentary. Released in 1981, the film showcased a new generation of country musicians: soulful, dirt-under-their-fingernails country outlaws like Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, David Allen Coe and a 21-year-old unknown called Steve Earle, artists who were set to challenge Nashville’s hegemony of high-hair and rhinestone schmaltz. All relative newcomers (an offer from Willie Nelson to take part was rejected on the grounds that he was too famous), they sang their own songs at Szalapski’s insistence, a notable exception being Steve Young, Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark and Steve Earle’s heartfelt jam on Hank Williams' I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry. Omitted from the film, it’s the first of three songs from a large, raucous Christmas Eve session (in every sense) at Guy Clark’s family home. Other highlights include Larry Jon Wilson’s Ohoopee River Bottomland, his sourmash baritone purposefully capturing the morning after the night before (Szalapski wanted it “deep and rusty with unuse”). But everything here feels unique, bespoke, special – and the DVD (released in 2006) retains the warm glow of history-in-the-making.

Jenny Bulley

Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 23/07/2008