In the 1990s Loveless was the ideal new-country singer. She had unfakeably authentic roots: she really is a coal miner’s daughter, really comes from eastern Kentucky, really grew up in the Old Regular Baptist Church. She revered both bluegrass and honky-tonk, yet she also had the grit and sexiness of rock and roll (“I Try to Think About Elvis”) and a pinch of new-woman sass (“I’m That Kind of Girl”). The cry you hear in her voice evokes Molly O’Day (the great country and gospel singer Loveless’s parents used to listen to when Patty was a kid), Patsy Cline and such later influences as Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt. And Loveless had the taste to avoid both the weepy, what-a-set-of-pipes pyrotechnics of Reba McEntire and the calculated mix of innocence and corruption that sold LeAnn Rimes. But the rise of the pop-country divas Shania Twain and Faith Hill made even one of these attributes a deal-breaker; since 1997, Loveless says, she’s had just two top-10 hits, and she’s been relegated to the “Classic Country” radio format–the Jones and Wynette set. “That’s a compliment, but it’s like, ‘Are you too country to be played on country radio?’ The music that I’ve done recently has been struggling.”
“Mountain Soul” makes you wish Loveless even more disrespect, alienation and rinky-dink recording budgets. It’s got funky, yearning male-female duets (two with rowdy-country icon Travis Tritt), uptempo romps (one with Earl Scruggs, the founding father of bluegrass banjo, still sounding good in his mid-70s) and “Soul of Constant Sorrow,” a unisex rewrite of Stanley’s signature song. Most of it was recorded live in the studio with no overdubs. “The way Emory would put it to you,” Loveless says, “is ‘Here it is, warts and all.’ When we’d listen back to it, I’d hear my little mistakes and I’d go, ‘Oh, honey. Oh, can’t I just go back in and–’ ‘No’.” So where’s a wart? Loveless laughs. “I’m not gonna tell you.” Come on–one wart? “OK, in the chorus of ‘Just Someone I Used to Know’? I cringed a little bit when I heard it. But now it’s grown on me, and I’m goin’, ‘Well, if nobody else hears it, I can live with it’.” Let’s listen. OK, there it is: she must be talking about the first time she sings the word “just.” Yeah, pretty bad.
Please.
Loveless admits it’s partly such rough spots that made the records she grew up on–Flatt and Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis–so involving. These telltale signs of humanity have lately helped sell a million copies of the rootsy “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack, featuring Stanley and the late John Hartford. And they’re all over the 26 CDs of Alan Lomax field recordings from the South that Loveless bought Gordy last Christmas. If anything, “Mountain Soul,” like many new bluegrass records–from Dolly Parton’s “Little Sparrow” to Del McCoury’s “Del and the Boys”–is still too polished for its own good. That Nashville perfectionism dies hard. But Loveless’s heart and soul are in the right place: back home in the mountains. In fact, she’s learned that Molly O’Day herself is buried just four miles from the Kentucky coal town where they shot the “Mountain Soul” cover. “I find it eerie,” Loveless says. “Like this was meant to be.” Don’t know. Couldn’t say. Just glad it happened.
