Livin’ Lovin’ Losin’: Songs of the Louvin Brothers
Livin’ Lovin’ Losin’: Songs of the Louvin Brothers is the worst sort of tribute album: a casual listener will likely come away from it wondering why all the fuss over some post-World War II country duo. But there’s indeed good reason for a tribute, even if the 30 country pros assembled don’t quite prove it. Without Charlie and Ira Louvin’s close-harmony country songs, recorded in the 50s and early 60s, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris lose a crucial influence. Without the Louvins, the Everly Brothers have nothing to go on, which means Simon & Garfunkel hardly exist. Without the Louvins’ 1956 recording of “In the Pines,” Kurt Cobain has no model for the tangle of heartbreak, accusation, and shame he conveys on Nirvana’s Unplugged version of the song.
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And without the Louvins, there’s one fewer attempt on the life of Elvis Presley for debasing himself in the sight of God. During a 1956 tour, Presley and Ira Louvin were playing hymns backstage when Presley confessed that he felt forced to avoid singing spirituals in public. Ira–by all accounts a raging, mean-spirited alcoholic tormented by his failure to become a minister–grabbed Presley by the throat. If Ira’s rhetoric was despicable (“Why, you white nigger, if that’s your favorite music, why don’t you do that out yonder? Why do you do that nigger trash out there?”), his reaction does convey his desperate, violent unwillingness to exclude God from his work: you at least try to have it both ways. The uneasy coexistence of the spiritual and the secular is what makes the Louvins worth listening to today; their best songs struggle with issues of faith in the wider world, and seem to view falling in love not so much a goal as evidence of a flaw.
Much of the disc, however, has an overproduced adult-contemporary sheen that smooths off the song’s rough edges, an inevitability when you recruit Glen Campbell, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, and the increasingly uninteresting Alison Krauss. Only Marty Stuart and Del McCoury’s “Let Us Travel, Travel On,” a gritty guitar-and-mandolin exploration of sin and hope, seems willing to go after the Louvins’ devotional tone. For the most part Livin’ comes off as a revisionist history project, designed by Ira’s daughter Kathy and Jackson (who spent 12 years playing with Campbell) for a large mainstream imprint, Universal South. If it’s true–as the liner notes argue–that the Louvins were eager to record secular songs in the 50s, a modern collection still ought to make more sense of the spiritual tracks they kept coming back to. Ignoring everything but the Louvins’ pop hits might have made some sense by the commercial standards of the 50s and 60s, but in the 21st century, when mainstream country and No Depression (“in heaven,” remember) have each reconfirmed God’s country credibility, there’s little excuse.
The centerpiece of the set was “O Death,” which Stanley sang a capella, in a careworn voice that suggests a line like “O death, won’t you spare me over till another year?” means a great deal to him. It was, in fact, Stanley’s showstopper, which in his brand of bluegrass means a creeping chill of something larger and more fearsome at work pervades the room; when he got to the line about death a-movin’ upon his soul, a baby in the audience began to wail.
