Dale Earnhardt is Dead, Wanda June Done Left Me

Glen Rock, PA ? Dale Earnhardt is dead. And almost as bad, Wanda June done left me. She got sick of stoking the wood stove, sick of droppin young 'uns, sick of cooking up her man-pleasing meals, sick of hoeing the taters. She got sick of me laying in bed all day drinking Pabst.

So anyway one day she goes to an "art" opening in the big city, and discovers her true self: a French lesbian named Chloe. Now she's moved to a flat in the Folies Bergere with some butch bint, leaving me, in despair, to ponder the meaning of life.

Hence I have turned to the great philosophers. "Only two things in life that make it worth livin': guitars tuned good and firm-feeling women." That's the wisdom of Waylon Jennings. Dwight Yoakam's version: "Guitars, Cadillacs, and hillbilly music: that's the only thing that keeps me " hanging on."

For Waylon, it's women. For Dwight, who has actually dated Sharon Stone, it's cars. But one thing that they?as also Epictetus, Lao Tzu and Nietzsche?agree on is the necessity of good country music. Without country music, life is empty, vain: life is pretentious yet gutless: life is insufferably sophisticated yet utterly vapid: in short, life is France.

Personally, the only thing that keeps me hangin' on is antidepressants, personal lubricants and the amazing albums that people keep sending me in the mail. Day after day, I lie on the floor, quivering like a huge yet tasty gelatin dessert, waiting for the mailman. And day after day I find what I need to keep me keepin' on.

Okay, I'm breaking it down into different categories of true national American treasures.

(A): Universally acknowledged national treasures.

Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn are of course no longer commercial forces in country music, as revealed by the labels of their recent albums (If I Could Only Fly (Anti) and Still Country (Audium), respectively). This is due to the movement toward youth and beauty that has brought us that gigantic kewpie doll, Faith Hill. And it must be admitted that neither Merle nor Loretta can deliver the kind of world-challenging moments that they once did: "Okie from Muskogee" or "The Pill."

But they both have something that they didn't have 30 years ago: a kind of late-breaking perfection or an exquisitely sweet overripeness. Merle and Loretta are beyond trying to impress anybody or being anything other than exactly what they are. The performances here have a degree and variety of perfection that we hear also in the recent work of Johnny Cash and George Jones, a retrospective achievement that surveys and masters not only a distinguished career, but a whole tradition of American music.

Both albums are explicitly about aging and loss; indeed they're almost concept albums. And hence they continue the tradition of both artists and of country music of focusing directly on experience. Where Merle used to sing about prison, whiskey and patriotism, now he sings about wishing he could still snort cocaine and trying to reconcile with his kids. Where Loretta used to sing about having babies and dealing with cheating men, now she sings with extreme poignancy about the death of her husband Doolittle.

Dolly Parton is younger than Loretta and Merle, and her delicate soprano has not ripened. That's fine, because it is certainly one of the defining instruments of American music. Her second bluegrass album, Little Sparrow (Sugar Hill), shows that despite a long record of commercial recording in a variety of styles, Dolly is still most comfortable with straight-up old-time Appalachian music.

But the album is not traditional bluegrass, for a simple reason. Bluegrass is rarely a showcase for the solo voice: the vocal is traditionally a perfect ensemble of close harmony. There is some harmony on Little Sparrow, but it's a Dolly Parton album and so built around her voice. In that sense we should think of it more as an acoustic country album than as bluegrass. And anyway, to be perfectly honest about it, there's a lot of contemporary bluegrass that I like better (Don Rigsby's masterful Empty Old Mailbox [Sugar Hill] springs to mind), though the album has beautiful moments. And there are so many dead babies whose mothers' ghosts haunt the mountains that it begins to feel a bit over the top. Dolly's voice is similar to, say Emmylou Harris', but while Emmylou's performance is always understated, Dolly on occasion emotes so vociferously that you laugh when you should be crying.

(B): Soon-to-be universally acknowledged national treasures, now in their prime.

John Anderson is certainly one of the defining artists in country over the last 20 years. Both an insistent traditionalist and a one-off eccentric, he takes up a nasal, fairly high-in-the-register vocal style that runs from Lefty Frizzell through Merle and Keith Whitley. Nobody's Got It All (Columbia) is one of his best albums, though there is nothing on it quite as his good as his very best songs, classics like "Swingin'," "Seminole Wind" and "Bend It Until it Breaks." On the other hand, there's great shit here about snake handling ("The Big Revival"), self-loathing ("It Ain't Easy Being Me") and marital contretemps ("Baby's Gone Home to Mama").

I guess I hate to admit this, because even people who don't like country music seem to like him, but I do think that Dwight Yoakam is the best country artist working today. These people, though, who purport to hate country and love Dwight?this includes Wanda, wherever she may be?need to reflect, because he's perfectly hard-corn. In particular, the arrangements achieved by Dwight and producer/guitar player Pete Anderson show an encyclopedic knowledge of the tradition from 1950 to 1980. The stuff is original, but it is filled with sly references that range throughout all the styles of country music. That's why I prefer a full-blown studio production like Tomorrow's Sounds Today (Reprise) even to last year's exquisite solo acoustic set dwightyoakamacoustic.net.

Dwight's style is poised between the Ralph Stanley bluegrass of his native Kentucky and the Buck Owens honkytonk of his fictively adopted Bakersfield. Dwight's last several studio albums of originals have been simply devastating, approaching ever closer to total perfection. It is hard to picture how he, or indeed anyone, can do any better than Tomorrow's Sounds Today. There are several songs that deserve to be classics, including "Dreams of Clay" and "The Heartaches are Free," and the thing finishes off with two insanely excellent duets with Buck.

Mark Chesnutt is both commercially successful and extremely underrated. When people mention the top few male country singers, they never mention Mark, but 20 years from now we'll remember him with Dwight and Alan Jackson as one of the central artists of the era. The voice is absolutely classic: ringing with Jones and Gosdin but also unique. He's always had great songs, but the albums, like a lot of mainline Nashville albums, have had their clunkers. Lost in the Feeling (MCA), on the other hand, has no clunkers, and shows Chesnutt at his very best on every cut. Covering the Conway Twitty classic title cut was a great idea, and Chesnutt's reading is definitive, as always.

(C): People who could eventually be national treasures.

Kacey Jones's song "Till Dale Earnhardt Wins Cup #8" turned from being a novelty song about the sex strike of a Winston Cup fan to heart-rending eulogy. It might be hard for some of you New Yorkers to understand that this thing has out here been like the Kennedy assassination. Earnhardt was our Jordan, our Ali, our RuPaul. We'll be devoting the rest of the year to disbelief about and then again to an exquisite appreciation of the exquisite perfection of Earnhardt's death: on impact, last lap at Daytona.

Back to Kacey: her album Every Man I Love Is Either Married, Gay, or Dead (IGO) is quite the mixed bag. There are a lot of comedic cuts, including a wonderful version of the Loretta/Conway duet "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly." On that one, she works with Delbert McLinton, whose own Nothing Personal (New West) is as good as any roots rock album of the last several years. Or try this lyric: "I hate your lousy rotten stinking guts, but I'm not bitter./It's just my luck, you stupid schmuck, you boinked our babysitter." Then again there are beautiful serious country cuts that Kacey interprets with great intensity. The funny stuff gets your attention, but it gets old fast. On the other hand, Kacey has got something that will last if she uses it.

Trick Pony is what we might call a hell of a bar band. They got the rowdy country rock thing going in a big way, as on their first single, "Pour Me." Trick Pony (Warner Bros.) is put together beautifully, so it sounds both rootsy and fresh as hell. Heidi Newfield has a kind of bar-vet knowingness combined with a strong voice that, along with a bunch of good songwriting, makes for a pretty distinctive sound. Plus they've recruited Johnny and Waylon for a version of Cash's "Big River."

Leslie Satcher is the best new country artist I've heard in some time, and Love Letters (Warner Bros.) is both lithe and gutsy. The title cut, "Love Letters from Old Mexico," which features Emmylou and Alison Krauss on harmonies, is a neatly constructed and affecting piece of writing. But Satcher, who wrote or cowrote all the songs, is just as notable for her voice, which is supple and commercial and distinctive. There are a couple of songs here that could be standards, especially "Goin' Down Hard."

(D) A national treasure who may not actually exist.

Pete Labonne is the Sasquatch of American music. I had heard rumors about him for years, and people would tell me that he had dozens or "hundreds" of bizarre or great songs, including the legendary "We Made a Mountain Out of a Molehill (of Love)"; I spent some time searching for the supposed 45 of the supposed song "I Mow the Lawn" supposedly made with a band called the Party Nuggets. He was, according to rumor, a sort of rootsy Frank Zappa or a postpostmodern Van Morrison. Every so often, I'd hear that he had gigged in Costa Rica, the Ivory Coast, British Columbia. He was 20; he was 70; he didn't exist at all and was the nom de disc of some bipolar country star.

Then a friend of mine finally sent me an actual CD, and told me that Labonne was perfectly real and that he lived in a cabin in the Adirondacks without electricity, phone, running water. I'm not sure I believe this any more than the previous tales, but there is undeniably this disc: Meditation Garden (Sonic Trout, www.sonictrout.com), that seems to have pictures of the elusive Labonne on the cover.

The legend is fully justified. Take the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs and jack up both the eclecticism and the eccentricity one more notch, throw in lyrics by Andre Breton and record it all on maybe a four-track and you've got one of the most challenging and amusing things you'll ever hear. Lounge piano and polka accordion and flamenco guitar bounce off of boogie-woogie and soul and folk music like a NASCAR pile-up. There are strange jokes and beautiful sentiments.

Hope never really dies. Maybe Labonne can be coaxed down/back from wherever he really is to play a gig or record an album in a professional studio. And Maybe Wanda can be coaxed back to heterosexual hoeing.