Review: The Return of America's Voice

Levon Helm, Dirt Farmer
Vanguard Records 79844-2 [2007]

Levon Helm's strong return scratches a musical itch that had been nagging me for years, but it was an itch I had been at a loss to locate. You know those days when it seems none of the music on your record shelf will quite satisfy? Problem solved. The album Dirt Farmer, produced by Larry Campbell, is a an album of contemplation, reminiscence, reflection, and joy.

Three of the saddest days for devotees of the inaptly named "country rock" were the suicide of keyboardist/drummer Richard Manuel in 1986, the death of bassist/fiddler Rick Danko in December of 1999, and drummer/mandolinist/guitarist Levon Helm's diagnosis of throat cancer in 1996. The Band's three eccentric but hauntingly beautiful voices were silenced. These losses were cause for recollection of some great music, but also decades of substance abuse and heartache. Like Manuel and Danko, Levon Helm was at one time a man of addictions. Compare "The Weight" from The Band's Music from Big Pink to "Strawberry Wine" from Stage Fright and you can hear how drugs affect a man's singing ability. Yet while death is a loss that aches for a while but can eventually move toward acceptance, the irony of losing one's voice - and then having to live with the loss - is reminiscent of Beethoven's deafness.

How does one continue when one's instrument is taken away? Helm, with the support and encouragement of his daughter Amy Helm and others, slowly brought his voice back, not to the full swagger of his earlier days, but beautifully and powerfully present. And how to celebrate this return? Thankfully, through a balanced and subtly restrained statement of everything Levon Helm is and ever was.

Wielding a mix of traditional and contemporary songs, Dirt Farmer sits comfortably in the pocket, and has the tone of good friends who have come over to play for a while in your living room. The performances feel natural, from veterans who use whatever talents are in the room to make the song whatever it can be in the moment. Their respect for the material supercedes their awareness of the listening audience. The music has a traditional context, but is not historicized. Don't you think if a drum set was available a century ago in some farmhouse in the mountains that they'd have used it for making music?

Unlike much of the contemporary folk, country and country-rock fare, Helm is in that tier of artist whose work speaks volumes without unnecessary preening, which I appreciate in an age where people pursue fame for essentially doing nothing. Peter Carlson of The Washington Post remarked, "These days, country music stars are created in a factory in China, molded out of plastic by workers earning 38 cents an hour, then shipped to Nashville, where they are fitted for a cowboy hat and taught to sing ditties written by a committee of moonlighting Hallmark employees." [November 8, 2005] I've also suffered through countless old-timey records where great pains were taken to give the performances pathos, the "this-is-the-music-of-my-people-so-take-me-seriously" attitude, and I can say with experience that this rarely succeeds.

Levon Helm, to the contrary, simply does what he does best: he sings the damn song. His is for all intents and purposes one of the most distinctively American voices. He was raised in the cotton fields of Arkansas, bathed in the sounds of the Opry on WSM out of Nashville and Sonny Boy Williamson on KFFA in Helena, and he earned his stripes playing the rockabilly club circuit in Ontario, Canada with Ronnie Hawkins. Levon Helm and the Band were a touchstone of cultural unity. Southern enough to please rednecks, ornery enough to please renegades, and Dylanized enough to please folkies and hippies. They were a safehouse amid the musical tumult of the late 1960s. Their songwriting collective (especially Robbie Robertson's lyrics) gave Helm's singing a legitimacy for which few modern cookie-cutter country crooners could dare to hope.

That same spirit is evident here. Dirt Farmer contains fourteen tracks, and there's not a bum in the lot. A song can be found for just about anyone. For the fans of his earlier work, "The Girl I Left Behind" resonates with the classic grooves of The Band, and "Got Me a Woman" by Nashville songwriter Paul Kennerley would have been in good company among The Basement Tapes. Their rendition of the Carter Family's "Single Girl, Married Girl" is half-timed a la "Up on Cripple Creek." For fans of traditional material, Campbell's fiddling on "Little Birds" and "Anna Lee," and the three-part harmonies by Helm, his daughter Amy, and Teresa Williams will be sure to soothe. Blues fans will enjoy the gut-bucket performance of J.B. Lenoir's "Feelin' Good." Perhaps the final track, "Wide River to Cross" may be, after all, a tad shaded by a veil of pathos, but after listening to the thirteen preceding songs the effect is actually quite welcome.

Here's a record that, like the Levon Helm of old, unifies the disparate and soothes the musical tumult.