Various Artists – Heartworn Highways
The years were 1975 and ’76, the locations Austin and Nashville, the machine a Nagra 2 track, the purpose a film documentary on the lyrical outsiders, neither outlaws nor folkies, mostly spending their days trying to outdrink and outwrite each other. Judging from this previously unreleased audio soundtrack, David Allan Coe wins this round, with a desiccated and half-doomed original called “I Still Sing The Old Songs”, a tune his later career suggests he couldn’t have written but which stands with the best songs of that moment. Close behind is a definitive “Alabama Highway”, in which Steve Young gets inside the voice of a black sharecropper without pathos or presumption. Along with the very first known recordings of Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, and John Hiatt, Guy Clark’s “Desperados Waiting For A Train”, and Townes Van Zandt’s “Waitin’ ‘Round To Die” and “Pancho And Lefty”, the songs tell of aging and the end — but what a beginning.