Signature Sounds
2008
Still Crooked
About This Album
This third album, Still Crooked from Crooked Still, is an elegant package of superbly crafted musical styles taking country/folk as the deep foundation and veering off into exhilarating and exciting directions. Starting things off with a haunting version of the late Ola Belle Reed's "Undone in Sorrow," the album begins much like the Youngbloods Elephant Mountain when "Darkness, Darkness" opened that LP almost 40 years prior. Producer Eric Merrill doesn't need drums to propel this quintet, the fiddles a blazin' on a two-and-a-half minute entry entitled "The Absentee," like the equally lively "Poor Ellen Smith" keeps things flowing in a square dance sort of way. The slick 12-page booklet has lyrics to all the titles, "Captain Captain," serious and slow, making for a good read while the music plays. The devotion to the styles embraced is spot-on, a reinvention of Sydney Carter's a cappella "Pharoah" from Rounder Records release of the many Alan Lomax tapes, this one found on the compilation Southern Journey, Vol. 1: Voices from the American South, is stunning -- even more so when you compare it to Carter's -- or take the effort to actually put Sydney Carter's voice as the intro to this string-heavy rendition and hear the tremendous results.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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