Jim Lauderdale: The Hummingbirds

Much has been written about the irony of traditional country artists' difficulty in getting airtime on country radio, which may be the result of country musicians' musical roots reaching too far back for broadcasters' "in-the-now" pop sensibilities. Young mainstream rockers tend to cite influences from not much more than five or six years ago, while even the newest country traditionalists make references to men and women who've been dead for half a century. Over the course of a decade-long recording career, traditionalist troubadour Jim Lauderdale has worked with rock artists and had his songs recorded by hot country stars. But he's also toured with graybeards Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, and he was collaborating with bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley long before O Brother, Where Art Thou broke. A year after putting out the stellar Other Sessions (a collection of honky-tonkers he wrote with friends), Lauderdale returns with two simultaneous releases. The Hummingbirds is a typically entertaining Lauderdale record, full of country songs informed by rock and jazz—but only inasmuch as those genres draw from the same folk base. The Hummingbirds has a near-celestial setting, with Lauderdale's light twang wrapped in a dreamy weaving of picking, strumming, and sliding guitars. Most of all, the album has Lauderdale's cosmopolitan sense of purpose: The music explicates simple, self-exposing lyrics, as in the jab-and-retreat of "There And Back Again," the fluidity of "I'm Happiest When I'm Moving," or the jittery, hovering title track. Lauderdale's second collaboration with Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys, Lost In The Lonesome Pines, is a respectable old-school bluegrass record, though it lacks the feeling of possibility that marks Lauderdale's best work. Consisting mostly of originals, Lonesome Pines highlights Stanley's sweet rasp and the elaborate banjo-and-mandolin constructions of the Boys (Steve Sparkman and John Rigsby, especially), and when the assemblage gets hold of a rip-roaring number like "Zacchaeus," the almost supernatural uplift of mountain music is in full effect. But it's telling that the last song on The Hummingbirds, "New Cascade," presents a Tim O'Brien-aided, fiddle-draped version of bluegrass that has more swirl and excitement than any of Lonesome Pines' overt nods to the past. For all Lauderdale's classic country virtues, the real irony is that he's much more progressive than he appears.