The Best Country Albums of 1994, Part 1

David with a big tent take on the year in country music, thirty years ago

1994 was a fantastic year for country music, full of great albums from the Hot New Country mainstream as well as from the emerging alternative country scene that was at once still in its country + punk heyday and beginning to expand into the twangy/rootsy/singer-songwriter catchall that would soon enough become known as Americana. Those on the side of so-called insurgent country tended to disdain the Hat Act mainstream loudly and often. Notably, mainstream country fans failed to return those insults not out of any magnanimity or big ears but rather because they’d never heard of Iris DeMent or the Starkweathers or the Bottle Rockets, and that’s just choosing close to home in Missouri. But, as I noted back in October, when rounding up the Best Country Albums of 1993, the alternative/mainstream chasm was widening just as the quantity of music worth a country fan’s time was increasing.

Here are my picks for the 15 best country albums of 1994: big-tent version, the way I try to listen and probably the way you do too.

Blood Oranges - The Crying Tree

Little remembered today, and frustratingly overlooked even on release, The Crying Tree, produced by Eric Ambel, goes on my short list of alt.country masterpieces. With great songs that bounce between sprightly and hulking, the Boston-based Blood Oranges featured three fantastic songwriters essential to the project, so I mean it as no insult to singer and mandolin man Jimmy Ryan or to guitarist Mark Spencer when I note that the highlights are the contributions of the band’s singer-songwriting bassist Cheri Knight. Her “Hell’s Half Acre,” about a woman getting the hell out of the world she’s about to burn down, sounds like Exene and X at their best. For her pastoral title track, Knight and the band channel Crazy Horse for the No Depression set and deliver a five-minute howl. Never has grief felt so heavy.  

Bottle Rockets - The Brooklyn Side

The more time that passes, the more it feels to me like Missouri’s the Bottle Rockets were the alternative country band that mattered most. Their punk-twang split leaned more country than did their better-known friends in Uncle Tupelo, and the result was that they helped change country while Tupelo couldn’t budge the punk needle. The B’Rox had an unironic sense of humor, too, and by embracing southern rock and Merle Haggard as much as they did, Brian Henneman’s story songs will likely never sound dated. Cowritten Henneman with Scott Taylor, “Welfare Music” is the beau ideal of their humanist politics, and their rock-radio-ready “Radar Gun” and their two-thousand dollar “1000 Dollar Car” rock a class-consciousness that may be why they matter to me most—though a joyous Chuck Berry knock off called “Take Me to the Bank” sure don’t hurt. (Oh, and like The Crying Tree, The Brooklyn Side was produced, for East Side Digital, by Eric Ambel, alt.country’s early secret weapon.)

Johnny Cash - American Recordings

I always feel compelled to gainsay praise of Cash’s first collaboration with producer Rick Rubin. Not because I don’t think it’s great. But I do bridle at the way authenticity types pull from its less-is-more arrangements support for their less-is-more-real foolishness. I’m leery as well of the way the album’s critical reception takes this great entertainer/artist’s great multi-layered persona and shrinks it to “badass.” Hell, American Recordings isn’t even the best of Cash’s American Recordings. But… Still… There’s no denying the album’s dark humor or the sweet-and-scary power of its covers of songs by Danzig, Cohen, Waits, Lowe, Kristofferson or, on a live “Tennessee Stud,” Driftwood. One of his own songs, “Drive On,” is about a Vietnam vet trying to live up both to the lives he’s seen lost and to “the walkin’, talkin’ miracle” of a life and legacy that’s ongoing.

Iris DeMent - My Life

Singer-songwriters are often most valued, or at least most discussed, in terms of that descriptor’s second half. Allow me to suggest that as good a songwriter as Iris DeMent may be, and I’m not sure I can name a better one working today, she might be an even greater singer. Her distinctive accent blends Ozark and Delta and lands keening and lovely at once. “Sweet Is the Melody” is a song about songwriting, but it’s the somehow solidness-and-lightness of her soprano that lets it glide about the dance floor so fetchingly. Somehow, her complex reading of “No Time to Cry,” about her reaction to her father’s death, both fulfills and belies its title. “My Life” might be my favorite: Its lyrics only wave at the richness and trouble, the gratitude and inevitable losses, that her voice conveys when she sings its chorus that final time.

Alan Jackson - Who I Am

This album both solidified Jackson’s commercial successes—it went quadruple platinum–while also firmly establishing him as Hot New Country’s most high-profile traditionalist. “Gone Country” was a smart commentary on country-come-latelys that also, like his cover of “Summertime Blues,” rocked the jukebox. “”Livin’ on Love” is a state-of-the-art updating of a classic genre theme, and “I Don’t Even Know Your Name” is a novelty you want to hear over and over because of the hot studio picking. Those all went to No. 1, and the lonely-but-learning “Song for the Life” made it to No. 6—but don’t sleep on his cover of the Kendalls’ “Thank God for the Radio.”

George Jones – The Bradley Barn Sessions

It seemed like a good idea. Let’s pair Jones, still the greatest country singer alive but hitless for years at this point, with some Hot New Country acts in a legendary studio and get him back on the radio. The barely-charting single, “A Good Year for the Roses,” was with Alan Jackson, and one by one a Who’s Who of other country stars—Marty Stuart and Travis Tritt, Vince Gill and Mark Chesnutt, Trisha Yearwood and Tammy Wynette, Trio (on “Where Grass Won’t Grow”), even Keith Richards (a harrowing “Say It’s Not You”)—they all step up to join the Possum on one of his classics, and they each do good work. Then they each get low-key schooled by the master. A perfect little record.

Robert Earl Keen - Gringo Honeymoon

Gringo Honeymoon is, 1989’s West Textures aside, my favorite Robert Earl Keen album, and it’s bookended by my picks, at least some days, for his finest songs: “Think It Over One Time” and “Dreadful Selfish Crime.” In between comes a fantastic cover of Steve Earle’s “Tom Ames’ Prayer” and Robert Keen’s own prayer “Merry Christmas from the Family.” Live, audience and performer can conspire to shrink that one to a joke. On record, it just keeps growing.

Patty Loveless - When Fallen Angels Fly

The album’s loaded with solid-to-strong songs, but as always, it’s Patty Loveless that makes the difference. “I Try to Think about Elvis” lets her rock a broken heart to distraction like Presley himself, and she leaves Jim Lauderdale’s “Halfway Down” sounding a good deal lower than that. She’s a material girl in the strictest sense, grounded in mountain soil and so emotionally present you feel as if you can touch both her pain and her desire for something better. Her sympathetic reading of Gretchen Peters’ “You Don’t Even Know Who I Am” creates two lonesome worlds, collides them, and embodies all their pain. I’ve been calling her the best country singer alive for decades now, but it was on When Fallen Angels Fly, including its grace-granting Billy Joe Shaver-penned title song, when I first understood that was the standard Patty Loveless was setting.

The Magnetic Fields – The Charm of the Highway Strip

When Stephin Merritt compares a lover’s eyes here to “long Vermont roads with tacky songs on the radio” and to “toothless young men in Tennessee,” he doesn’t mean the kinds of songs he writes and he’s not referring to the kinds of people who listen to Stephen Merritt songs. But when, in the same song, he notes that those country songs don’t help you sleep, he steps beyond cheap, buffering stereotypes, and confesses country’s appeal enough to toss and turn with it. Not the sounds of the genre, of course, though I do think that the synthetic rhythm to “Lonely Highway” has a kind of clip-clop spaghetti western thud, and that here and there his rinky-dink electronics nearly sneak up on twang. The most “country” part of the project is its use of the music’s images around trains and the road—except the myths that, in country music, push outward to the country itself, the Magnetic Fields use for inward, private dreamscapes. Still, when Merritt sings, “Life is too short to hang around,” even Merle might cock an ear.

The Mavericks - What a Crying Shame

Long before their reinvention this century as a Cuban-county-rock party band, and just beyond their beginnings as a nascently class-conscious and politically minded rootsy bar band, The Mavericks were a great retro-leaning country-radio singles act. Granted, they had mixed results on that front: What a Crying Shame yielded five singles but only one of them, “O What a Thrill,” even managed to crack the Top 20. But what a sound! Raul Malo and the Mavs sometimes suggest what Roy Orbison would sound like if he’d fronted the Buckaroos, sometimes what the A-Team might have done in the Hot New Country nineties, but whether on their nervously energized Springsteen cover (“All That Heaven Will Allow”) or Malo’s countrypolitan power ballad cowritten with Heartbreaker Stan Lynch (“I Should Have Been True”), their rock and roll side always peaks through.

Dawn Sears - Nothin’ But Good 

Woman on Major Label Makes Great Album that Goes Nowhere, Part 3… Following in the footsteps of last year’s entries in this depressingly perennial category (Bobbie Cryner and Kelly Willis), Dawn Sears released a strong single, “Runaway Train,” that managed to climb only to No. 62 and… that was that, at least as far as radio was concerned. All the Nashville Cats sure loved her though. She’d cut her teeth singing behind Vince Gill (He backs her here on a version of his “If I Didn’t Have You in My World”) and she was a member of the Time Jumpers for decades before she passed away in 2014. Here she torches it up like Patsy (on Jim Lauderdale’s “Planet of Love”) and dreams power-ballad big, a la Reba (on “That’s Where I Want to Take Our Love”), but she was always at her best as an unmistakable Connie Smith acolyte. Her cover of “Close Up the Honky Tonk” is retro-radio perfect and her own “Little Orphan Annie,” about burying a father, is like Iris’ “No Time to Cry” finally found time to sob.

The Starkweathers – 5-Song EP

Kansas City’s The Starkweathers go on the short list of early alt.country’s best. Their EP is long out of print, will likely remain so and, beyond a couple of singles both before and after, that’s the catalog: Like the hard-and-lonesome harmonies of co-frontmen Rich Smith and Mike Ireland, it was a briefly beautiful body of work. Smith has the angry  rockers here: “Town that I Hate” (which I described in the day as twanging “somewhere between CCR and R.E.M.”), the radical “Burn the Flag” (“If you don’t love it, change it.”) and a “my wife and my cheating brother” murder ballad called “One for Her, One for Him.” Ireland, who’d go on to record two fantastic albums as a solo act, writes and sings the sad ones: the lovely, haunting ballad “Most Every Night” (“I wait for a call that he’s coming / And I pray to God that he’s gone”) and “Danny Taylor,” an anti-death penalty story-song driven by electrocuted dobro and tagged by a bit of “Everyday People.”   

George Strait – Lead Me

Ho hum. Another year, another excellent George Strait album. One knock against Strait albums you may encounter is that they’re a little samey: If you’ve heard one, you’ve heard the other 32. As someone whose first book was a tiny overview of the Strait catalog, I can tell you the sameness of Strait’s albums is overstated and that their homogeneity bursts with variety in any case. Besides its fragile-but frisky Dean Dillon-penned title track, Strait’s fifteenth album in thirteen years includes some a chart-topping soft rocker, a Cajun dance number, a couple of bouncy country-rockers by Jim Lauderdale, and a deepish-dive Mel Street cover. Plus, another No. 1 called “The Big One,” which let’s just call bubblegum country.

Various Artists - Rhythm Country and Blues

In his Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South, our man Charles Hughes notes that this platinum duets, pairing soul, R&B and blues artists with their country acts was part of an historical reassessment of the “specific connection between country and soul.” “Just as the genres became symbols of racial divisions,” he writes, “images of their reunification became a potent metaphor” for a better world. Obviously that potential remains unfulfilled, and given ongoing developments, Rhythm Country and Blues remains both ahead of its time and (what else is new?) too little, too late. Nothing here matches the best of these stars finest solo work, but hearing Gladys Knight with Vince Gill (on “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing”), B.B. King and George Jones (“Patches”), Sam Moore and Conway Twitty (“Rainy Night in Georgia”), Little Richard and Tanya Tucker (“Somethin’ Else”), and the rest is a thrilling reminder of, and inspiration for, the work ahead.   

Bob Woodruff - Dreams and Saturday Nights

Bob Woodruff’s best lines here are as indelible as his melodies and guitar great James Burton’s ringing telecaster licks; his lyrics paint complex worlds in direct language. “I’ve seen a lot of people die, and it looks easy.” “Hope I don’t get caught with one taillight.” “The day I walked in on you and Cody / I know you both felt so ashamed.” “Mama’s in the hospital / God don’t let her die.” I don’t recall exactly how I came across this album, and I don’t recall anyone (besides me) reviewing it in the day even though it was on major label Asylum and features session stars like Glen D. Hardin, Harry Stinson, Sam Bush and, on the Bonnie and Clyde evoking-banjo from “You Can’t Win,” Bernie Leadon. Trust me: Dreams & Saturday Nights is one of the best country albums of the Nineties, and if you dig storytellers like Steve Earle or Robert Earl Keen, or you think you’d be into a rougher version of the Elvisy, country-rock sounds that The Mavericks and Dwight Yoakam were cooking up in the decade, you need to track this one down yesterday.

That’s it for Part 1. Let us know what you think. Did I miss something? Probably, but then again maybe not. Please check back next week for The Best Country Albums of 1994, Part 2, with 30+ more runners-up.

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