Porter Wagoner: Wagonmaster

He'd grown up watching "The Porter Wagoner Show" in Mississippi; he even appeared on it, as a prodigy picker at age 13. The resurrection of these memories, one fateful day not long ago, was the first step toward the work that would lead this year to Wagoner's latest album, Wagonmaster, on Anti Records.

"That all came back on the day the war started in Iraq," Stuart said, relaxing at the Tennessee State Museum amidst his collection of Country Music memorabilia several weeks before it would be exhibited as "Sparkle & Twang: Marty Stuart's American Musical Odyssey." "There was CNN coverage all day long. I watched as much as I could stand and then went to the back of the bus to take a nap, just to get away from it. Then, when I came back to the front, 'The Porter Wagoner Show' was on the RFD Channel. I watched the entire show, and when it was done I felt like I did when I was a kid: as bad as things can be, it's going to be OK."

Wagonmaster grew around the sound that Wagoner cultivated on his show. Between the blazing hoedown fiddle that kicks off the "Wagonmaster" theme to the last moments, a stark solo rendition of "I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow" during the final moments of "Porter and Marty," the album's last track, these performances transplant Wagoner's roots into a conceptually adventurous setting. On 17 songs, nine of them written or co-authored by Wagoner, every facet of his persona comes into view, from the playful side he displays at the Opry ("Be a Little Quieter") to the dark corners of the soul he'd explored in his classic 1972 recording "Rubber Room" ("Committed to Parkview," written by Johnny Cash and given to Stuart in 1983 to pass along to Wagoner. That this request slipped Stuart's mind until now may prove all for the best, given the stark and scary eloquence that Wagoner brings to the tune today).

Wagoner's voice is worn yet irresistibly expressive, whether meditating on the fleetness of life's passage ("A Place to Hang My Hat"), recounting the stories of strangers on a bus ride toward their diverse destinies on a Wagoner-Parton co-write ("My Many Hurried Southern Trips"), remembering a hermit who harbored a heartbreaking secret ("Albert Erving"), or even just talking on tape with Stuart about Hank Williams.

On "Brother Harold Dee," though, Wagoner achieves a transcendent eloquence through the now neglected device of recitation. "Red Foley taught me how to do that. I got to know him real well in Springfield, Mo., where he was doing 'The Ozark Mountain Jubilee,'" he recalled, noting the radio program on which he was featured until joining the Opry in 1957.

"He knew how to talk to an audience. He told me one time, 'You can't talk over an audience, because there are hundreds of them sitting there. So if you lose their attention, talk softer. They'll listen harder.' And it works."

The impact of Wagonmaster owes much to Wagoner's gift for bringing characters to life, as a writer, a vocalist or both. "I try to put myself into every song I project, in a way that makes it sound as though I've been there. Now, most of them, I have not been there. I never tried any of the drugs because of my fear for it. But I've always had a softness for people who get hooked on whiskey or some type of drugs. In order to sing this way, you've got to believe that you somehow have it in yourself. 'The Late Love of Mine' was unique in this way because I wanted to project that the guy was telling this story as though he was a drinker."

And here Wagoner began to sing the slow, sad waltz of this track from Wagonmaster: "How can I expect a good woman to love a slave of the wine? I knew that someday I'd lose her, the late love of mine."

With that, we're taken somewhere far from here, to wherever that place is that feeds the genius of Country Music when it's allowed to flow freely and poetically. It was this place that Stuart visited, not long after that that incident on his tour bus, when he dropped by Wagoner's home one night and left knowing why he would produce, play on and help his friend bring Wagonmaster into the world.

"Porter was ready, man," Stuart remembered. "He had song after song after song. The more I sat there, listening, the more I thought, 'This is why I fell in love with Country Music, right here.'"

2007 CMA Close Up News Service / Country Music Association, Inc.