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Section: Arts & Letters
Iris DeMent
By Ron Ehmke
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Lifeline.
Flariella Records.
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The thing that bugs me the most about this whole Red State/Blue State business is the way that a one-dimensional visual metaphor has been allowed to completely oversimplify the enormously complex terrain of contemporary America at the start of a new century. Boiling things down to Red vs. Blue is just another way to reduce a full rainbow of possibility down to black and white—which strikes me as every bit as wrongheaded as saying “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” or “don’t trust anyone over 30” or any other variation of “there’s only two kinds of people in this world...”
Take country-folk singer-songwriter Iris DeMent’s new album, Lifeline. If you know nothing about her earlier work and simply hear that it’s a collection of twelve classic gospel songs plus an original composition about Jesus, you’re likely to assume that DeMent is a textbook Red Stater: devout evangelical Christian, fundamentalist, social conservative, and so on.
And you’d be very, very wrong. For starters, the Messiah in the one new song, “He Reached Down,” opposes bigotry and religious hypocrisy, feeds the poor, and advocates for prisoners’ rights. “These songs aren’t about religion. At least for me they aren’t. They’re about something bigger than that,” DeMent writes in the album’s liner notes, adding, “They are the among the first songs I heard and the first I sang, I sing them still. Especially when I hit hard times.”
She goes on to mention that she’s just been through a bout of particularly hard times, and while the notes don’t elaborate, a recent, rare interview in the indispensable country/folk magazine No Depression fleshes out a few details, including divorce, remarriage, and long-term writer’s block. (It’s been eight years since DeMent’s last album, and she was never particularly prolific even in the brightest of periods.) Then there’s the angry response she got from a few listeners to some of the outspoken protest songs on her 1996 CD The Way I Should, and her own outrage at the war in Iraq.
Doesn’t sound quite so Crimson Red now, does she? Welcome to the world of Iris DeMent: a place where you can’t judge a person’s character by the company she keeps in the record store bins or the voting habits of her neighbors.
Many classic country performers (Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, and Merle Haggard come to mind) recorded entire albums of religious hymns, as did Elvis, but what sets Lifeline apart is its repertoire. You won’t hear “The Old Rugged Cross” or “Amazing Grace” or other inter-denominational standards here. (If this were a Christmas album, those songs would be the equivalents of “Silent Night” and “Away in the Manager.”) DeMent dips far deeper into the hymnal for her selections. Granted, I grew up in a different Protestant tradition than DeMent did, but my mother was raised a backwoods Southern Baptist, and even after warming a few pews in my youth, I can’t say that I recall “Hide Thou Me,” “That Glad Reunion Day,” or “Near the Cross.” (I do recognize “The Old Gospel Ship,” but only from vintage Carter Family albums, not from singing it myself.)
The singer makes these songs her own—as much as anyone can with 150-year-old Public Domain compositions, that is. I’m convinced that a casual, non-church-going listener to Lifeline who knew all of DeMent’s earlier albums but wasn’t familiar with the premise of this one would assume she had written “I’ve Got That Old Time Religion in My Heart” and at least half the other songs on the disc.
That’s because the themes in these songs—balancing hope and despair, sadness and joy—run through everything DeMent touches. Faith, the impulse to “let the mystery be,” as one of her earlier compositions puts it, is another recurring thread. Then, too, there’s her signature sound: unornamented piano or guitar supplemented by spare, traditional country/folk instrumentation and high harmonies, all augmenting a voice as impossible to describe as it is to imitate. (Consumer alert: it’s an acquired taste; my twang-phobic partner took one listen to Iris’ signature quaver, the very one which almost invariably reduces me to tears, and said, “People actually pay money to hear this?”)
Lifeline may not be the best place to start a collection of DeMent-ia; for that, I’d recommend the pretty-much-flawless My Life, whose journey through grief, doubt, and family history is guaranteed to break your heart and, at the same time, lift your spirits. But the new album hits all the right spots, just as it helps to fill in some of the colors missing from our nation’s cultural map.
RON EHMKE’s writing about music can be found at www.ronmusic.blogspot.com.
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