Charlie Louvin has been singing about the extremes of country music-- salvation and damnation-- throughout his long life. He and his brother Ira began harmonizing at home as kids in the 1930s and playing their first public shows as teenagers in the early 1940s. During the 1950s and 60s, they had hits with secular and nonsecular songs alike, which cemented their legacy as one of country's most conflicted acts: On guitar, Charlie was sensible and earnest, but Ira, playing mandolin, was temperamental and worldly. The brothers' differences illuminate the morals in every song, whether it's a churchly number like "The Family Who Prays" or a grisly narrative like "Knoxville Girl". Ira died in a car crash in 1965; Charlie continues to make music, but has no one to harmonize with him.
After his strong self-titled comeback in 2007, the 81-year-old Louvin has released two follow-ups, each exploring a starkly different theme. Steps to Heaven is an uplifting collection of old hymns; Charlie Louvin Sings Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs is pretty self-explanatory. One is about glory and redemption, the other tragedy and tribulation. While he's not nearly as vocally agile as he was decades ago, he does sound better-- stronger, clearer-- than he did on last year's Charlie Louvin. On Steps to Heaven, he sounds plucky and rejuvenated, tearing into these ten hymns with spirited reverence and hitting even the high notes confidently and happily. Producer Mark Nevers (best known for his work with Lambchop) sets him in a casual church service setting, backed primarily by Lee Derrick's rollicking piano and a bold backing choir that occasionally intrudes on Louvin's leads. His lively "There's a Higher Power" and intensely testimonial "I Am Bound for the Promised Land" are sincerely moving. He conveys belief and contentment with every note.
Steps to Heaven may be the more spiritually rewarding of these two albums, but Murder Ballads is much more fun. These grim accounts of mine collapses, shootings, train wrecks, and dead babies-- some of which appeared on the Louvin Brothers' 1956 album, Tragic Songs of Life-- have an almost tabloid aplomb in their matter-of-fact details. Louvin sounds spry on opener "Darling Corey" (featuring Andrew Bird on fiddle) and "Dixie Boll Weevil", on which he voices both the farmer and the destructive beetle. Most of the album, however, is much more somber and often elegant, with Louvin relating these stories with an easy, earthy gravity, as if he's singing about people he has known personally. "The Little Grave in Georgia" sets the mournful story of a dead teenager against a soft two-step, and "Mary of the Wild Moor", which was among the first songs Charlie and his brother performed as teenager, sounds especially stately in this arrangement. Still, it's impossible to ignore the gruesome details, like the conductor scalded to death by a steam engine on "Wreck of the Old 97". What a way to go.
Of course, there is some thematic and musical overlap between these two releases. Steps to Heaven, as its title makes clear, has death on its mind, albeit as a reward for a forthright life rather than as punishment or tragedy. Similarly, the characters on Murder Ballads yearn for the redemption they soon realize will never come. Happiness and grief inform every life, and Louvin inhabits the songs like he's experienced his share of both. As he sings on "Down with the Old Canoe", "The hand of God was in it all."
