Charlie Louvin Sings Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs

We Say...

Review by Andrew Mueller

Late-life renaissances are something of a tradition in country music: Johnny Cash made his best records in his last decade; Willie Nelson has never sung better than in his dotage and Glen Campbell has proved a startlingly effective interpreter of Green Day and the Replacements.

Even by those standards, however, Charlie Louvin's return from semi-retirement has been remarkable. Louvin blew out 80 candles in 2007, and seemed to become invigorated. His recent activities have included touring with the Old 97s and Cheap Trick, singing backing vocals for Lucinda Williams, recording a self-titled, Grammy-nominated album, knocking out a further album of gospel tunes and now delivering this ¬superb collection of ballads of the mordant and woebegone.

The starkly descriptive title is an obvious homage to the very first album Charlie recorded with his late brother Ira back in 1956, the Louvin Brothers' Tragic Songs Of Life. That mighty debut is referenced still further in the track listing: three songs on the Mark Nevers-produced Sings Murder Ballads. . . ("My Brother's Will", "Mary Of The Wild Moor", "Katy Dear") were originally recorded by Charlie Louvin on Tragic Songs

More than half a century later, the voice is inevitably different, but the subsiding of the trademark Louvin tenor into a gently gravelly, avuncular drawl does no disservice to those songs, or to any of the others on Sings Murder Ballads. . .: his version of "Wreck of the Old 97", abetted by steel guitar performing a cunning impression of a train whistle, is a masterclass in understatement, lending a refreshing wintry wit to one of the most covered songs in the country canon.

The almost discernible half-smile in that version is the dominant motif of this album. Where the recordings of the Louvin Brothers, especially the likes of gospel classic "Satan Is Real," were underpinned by tangible terror of physical and spiritual hazard, Charlie Louvin is wiser as well as older, and alive to the gothic absurdities of the likes of "Dark as a Dungeon" and "The Little Grave in Georgia."