Albumkritik

Families singing in harmony is a country legacy with roots as deep as the earliest days of white gospel. Because country songs are often about family troubles and domestic trials, harmony itself becomes a stirring metaphor. As part of the recent impulse to revitalize country music by tapping its original sources, two families in particular – the Judds and the Whites – have proved successful at restoring the music's simple honesty while deepening its appeal for modern audiences. The new LPs by these groups – the Judds' Heart Land and the Whites' Ain't No Binds – may break little new ground, but they continue to edge country music into the future by drawing on its past.

Nothing on Heart Land grabs the ear as instantly as "Why Not Me," the infectious title track from the Judds' debut LP, released in 1985. But without unduly straining for a crossover hit or violating the tasteful spareness of their mostly acoustic arrangements, the Judds – forty-one-year-old Naomi Judd and her twenty-two-year-old daughter, Wynonna – extend their musical reach on this latest album. The LP opens with the duo's peppy but pointedly understated rendition of Elvis Presley's smash "Don't Be Cruel," featuring background vocals by the Jordanaires, the gospel crooners who sang on Elvis's original. On Ella Fitzgerald's "Cow Cow Boogie," Wynonna and Naomi wrap their mountain-flavored harmonies around an insinuating arrangement reminiscent of the Andrews Sisters.

But hearty country staples are also fully represented on Heart Land. The ballad "Old Pictures" is an unabashed plunge into sentimentality that recalls the Judds' tear-jerking 1986 country hit "Grandpa (Tell Me 'bout the Good Old Days)." "I'm Falling in Love Tonight," "Maybe Your Baby's Got the Blues" and "Why Don't You Believe Me" are all restrained love ballads with swelling choruses – a type of song the Judds handle with impressive ease. And on "The Sweetest Gift," where the Judds are joined in madrigal harmony by Emmylou Harris, a standard-issue prison weeper about a mother visiting a wayward son is transformed by sheer vocal power into a statement about commitment and redemption.

On their fourth LP, Ain't No Binds, the Whites – Buck White and his daughters Sharon and Cheryl – assume family life as one of their subjects. This theme takes a particularly sharp twist on the LP's best track, "Love Can't Ever Get Better Than This," a Buddy Hollylike duet between Sharon and her country-star husband, Ricky Skaggs, that also appeared on Skaggs's 1986 LP Love's Gonna Get Ya! Against a musical backdrop that interweaves acoustic, electric and steel guitars, fiddle, keyboards, bass and drums, the Whites fashion three-part harmonies that adapt equally well to a country rocker like "You Wouldn't Be My First Mistake" or a dewy-eyed cheating song like "She's Written All Over Your Face." On "We Did Everything but Love," written by Jim Rushing and Dave Lindsey, the Whites even take on the issue of marital dissolution in the age of yuppie acquisitiveness: "We did everything that we could do to reach our goal/We had to have, but we forgot to hold."

Two songs in particular, "There Ain't No Binds" and "You Wouldn't Be My First Mistake" – which assert the importance of emotional independence ("I'd rather be alone tonight than lonely there with you," Sharon sings on the title track), the wisdom of experience and the willingness to take a chance on love – go a long way toward countering the passivity for which women's country music has so often been criticized. The best reward of both Ain't No Binds and Heart Land is that they teach the value of knowing where you come from before you get where you're going, as well as the value of remembering the sort of true bonds that can help you survive the trip. (RS 497)

ANTHONY DECURTIS

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