Patty is currently touring on the Critically Acclaimed Down From the Mountain Tour. I've reprinted below a few articles from different newspaper articles praising our Patty from the tour.
Patty Loveless isn't just Down From the Mountain, because she never left
ERIC CELESTE
The Burnt Hickory Bunch was on its way to Virginia to play in Ralph Stanley's annual bluegrass festival, working on some new covers of mountain tunes, songs the lead singer had sung with her family forever ago in the Kentucky holler where she was raised. That singer, country star Patty Loveless, was best known for her aching, soulful voice, catchy country-pop ballads and two-step numbers. Her band, though, was about her roots, about Americana, about the Deep South and the music that spoke to the longing and pain she knew well. The instruments were familiar--banjo, upright bass, fiddle, mandolin, Dobro--and the songs more so: the Stanley Brothers' gospel song 'Daniel Prayed,' as well as 'The Boys are Back in Town' and a take on 'Man of Constant Sorrow' titled 'Soul of Constant Sorrow.'
None of which would be a surprise if this scene had occurred within the past year. With the commercial success of the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? (6 million-plus records sold), it seems every 'country' artist who grew up within 40 miles of a hill, holler, coal mine, mountain or creek is rediscovering his or her 'roots.' Country-cred is, for the time being, at least, cool.
But Loveless' band worked these bluegrass numbers up in 1992. It wasn't a response to a trend. It was, cliché as it may seem, a first step in the redevelopment of a star who wasn't satisfied with a successful career that didn't pay homage to her past. If you have a problem believing cliché, you may as well stop reading: Loveless grew up around places called Beaver Bottom and Belcher Holler. She is, after all, a coal miner's daughter.
'After we did all this, we got back--we had recorded it, of course, and it was rough around the edges, and it was a little difficult to hear at times,' Loveless says while on the road from Buffalo, New York. 'But while we were listening to it, and [husband-producer Emory Gordy Jr.] looked at me and said, 'You know, honey, I would love to do a whole record like this with you someday.' Ten years later...lo and behold, it happened. I guess it was just in the stars. Who knows, maybe my dad had something to do with it. You know, he's probably watching over me, saying, 'I am going to have you doing this music before your career is through, one way or the other.''
The result was the best country music record of 2001, Mountain Soul. Although it was released six months after O Brother, it was in the works before the soundtrack made acceptable all things bluegrass and gospel. The album's best-known tracks were upbeat ('The Boys are Back in Town') or duets--the two Travis Tritt pairings, 'Out of Control Raging Fire' and 'I Know You're Married (But I Love You Still)'--but it's filled with many of those same mountain classics Loveless debuted at Stanley's festival a decade ago. That Loveless is one of the performers on the Down From the Mountain tour with Ralph Stanley--as well as Alison Kraus & Union Station, The Flatlanders, Emmylou Harris and others--is a testament to the power of symmetry over her life. Or, as she says, perhaps the pull of her past really does dictate her future.
Loveless notes, for example, the roster of talent that sprang from the same part of the country she knew growing up, everyone from Ricky Skaggs to the Judds to Loretta Lynn to Dwight Yoakam--who was also born in Loveless' hometown of Pikeville, Kentucky.
'I think it's the upbringing of that area that grounds you in music, that keeps a hold on you,' says Loveless, 45. 'For myself, when I was a little child, I would hear my mother going around the house humming, and I think, for the most part, music was a way of releasing any kind of feelings within. Because I recall that my family and many more like them, they didn't talk about much--they really didn't discuss their problems that much.
'Then, too, there was a lot of happiness and joy in the music. A lot of singing and dancing around my house, and I think that Ricky and Dwight and all of us, you know, I feel from that area, we were just surrounded with it. And a lot of those people moved away to a better life, and I'm sure that some of the music went with them. I believe Ricky and I and even Dwight, even though we moved away, we took it with us.'
Even so, once Loveless became a countrypolitan music star--she's a five-time CMA Award winner and had a slew of hits like 'You Don't Even Know Who I Am,' 'I Try to Think About Elvis,' 'Tear Stained Letter' and 'Trouble With the Truth'--she assumed she'd left much of her Kentucky past behind her. Even during the 'new traditionalist' movement of the early and mid-'90s, what sold on country radio was far slicker than most bluegrass music, and banjos were not in high demand in Nashville recording studios.
'I think if somebody was trying to tell me about my future, it would've been kind of hard for me to swallow because of the way that the music was in country, say, for the past 10 years,' Loveless says. 'Well, actually, from '85, or say, '83 up through, say, '95, country music was really just rolling like crazy, and so if they had told me back then, no, it would've been difficult for me to put that all together. Now, as far as breaking away from doing the contemporary country music and going and doing some bluegrass shows, yeah, I would believe that. But doing an entire tour such as this is...it's pretty overwhelming, pretty unbelievable that we're here today.'
As is the young, prime, ever-so-desirable 18-to-35-year-old demographic that makes up a large portion of the Down From the Mountain audience. 'I think a lot of what's going on, I feel that a lot of kids, especially college kids, they always are intrigued and have such interest in music that is very rootsy. And not just, you know, sort of bluegrass music--any form of music. They have an interest in, to know the history of it and how it came to be. It's so good to see that still continue on. Music is history--it speaks to us about our heritage and where we come from, and I think all of us, whether we're in college or of college age or whether of the age that I am now, myself, that we want to know about the music that brought us here.'
Which is not to say that Loveless rejects the music she has made before Mountain Soul. It was successful for her, and much of it was and is justifiably praised. Five years ago the Chicago Tribune called Loveless 'the most consistently serious female artist in Nashville.' Four years ago, the executive director of the Country Music Association noted that 'Patty Loveless is a timeless artist.' But like Nick Faldo, a top pro golfer who rebuilt his swing so he could be a championship golfer, Loveless knew that a certain level of success wasn't enough. With the commercial accolades had to come a feeling of artistic satisfaction. To crib the lyrics of her Mountain tourmate Emmylou Harris, Loveless went looking for the water from a deeper well.
'I felt good about the records that we've made over the years,' she says, 'but it got to the point that I feel that there were more and more new faces coming into play, and radio's format was getting shorter and shorter and shorter...And I think, through that whole process, that the album Strong Heart [2000] and the songs that were released from that sort of got lost in the shuffle...So, I was just getting a little bit frustrated, and I didn't want it to get that way, because I enjoyed what I did, I enjoyed making music, I enjoyed making records. So this album, this music, I did it because I wanted to. It was true to me.
'I feel that I try to stay true to my own feelings and my past--even if it's not successful today, somebody can turn around and listen to the music and say, you know, even 50 years from now, and say, 'That was really great stuff,' and I'm hoping that, even though I will maybe not be around, that that will be something I can leave behind.'
Bluegrass Breakout: The Down From the Mountain tour brings rural music to the masses.
BY STEVE BYRNE
Patty Loveless's earthy mountain music embodies the renegade spirit of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack.
No one seems to drive a wedge between film critics like the Coen brothers. O Brother, Where Art Thou? -- the big score last year for the quirky siblings, Joel and Ethan -- has been labeled disjointed, pandering, cliché-ridden, and lowbrow by those reviewers not enamored of the Coens' unorthodox irreverence.
But even the harshest reviews of O Brother could manage nothing but good things to say about the soundtrack -- a smorgasbord of musical styles popular in Depression-era Mississippi, the setting for the film. Some went so far as to say the movie was an excuse for the music.
And it wasn't only movie buffs who took notice. The soundtrack grabbed Album of the Year at both the Grammy and CMA awards, and O Brother's traditional classic 'A Man of Constant Sorrow,' as sung by Union Station member Dan Tyminski, with backing vocals from Harley Allen and Pat Enright, also collected Song of the Year at the CMAs.
Such accolades gladdened the hearts of country music purists, not merely for the songs themselves, but for the triumph of substance over style. No slick productions and heavy arrangements here. No belly-button-baring 'divas,' no matinee idols in skin-tight jeans, and not a thing that could possibly cross over to light rock or adult-contemporary radio. O Brother was, in the eyes of many, a refutation of all the record industry's whining about how sales are lagging these days because of Internet piracy. Give us the good stuff, the traditionalists said, and we'll buy it.
And six million of them did.
To further build upon the disc's success (read: make money), a package tour was put together featuring a variety of artists associated with the project. Dubbed the Down From the Mountain tour, the show boasts throwbacks like Del McCoury, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, and O Brother's greatest breakout, Ralph Stanley, the 74-year-old bluegrass legend who'd been playing banjo and singing professionally for over a half-century before finally getting a taste of the big time. The bill also includes such notables as Patty Loveless (the tour's only bankable commercial country star) and Ricky Skaggs, neither of whom played a role in the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?
'Even though Ricky and I are not part of the soundtrack, we've been part of the music,' Loveless says.
Indeed, Loveless is a natural choice to flesh out the Down From the Mountain tour. Her voice packs the same down-home punch as Stanley's, and her recent traditional country CD, Mountain Soul, drew hurrahs from those same critics who canonized O Brother. Moreover, Loveless spent the first 10 years of her life in Pike County, Kentucky, just over the rugged border from Stanley's home in Dickinson County, Virginia.
'I'm very proud to have shared the stage with him,' Loveless says of Stanley. 'My father would've been so proud. That's one regret I have, that my father didn't live to see me singing with Ralph Stanley.'
Loveless's dad, a coal miner, died of black lung disease before Patty became a recording star.
Skaggs's presence is even more fitting than that of Loveless. Skaggs's wife is Sharon White, of the group the Whites, who contributed the Carter Family's 'Keep on the Sunny Side' to the O Brother disc. Skaggs was also in Stanley's band for two years, starting when he was 17. He had been onstage with the late Bill Monroe at age six and performed on a television show hosted by Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs a year later.
'I was a boy from the mountains who loved mountain music, learning it from mountain men,' Skaggs says. 'Me being in Ralph Stanley's band was like a physics student going out with Einstein for two years. I was learning with the master.'
Like Loveless, Skaggs grew up in the foothills of eastern Kentucky. Cordell, Skaggs's hometown, is a hamlet in Lawrence County that can't even be found on a map because, Skaggs says, 'the Cordell Post Office fell into the creek a few years ago.' He says his inclusion in Down From the Mountain is the result of the promoters' desire to get more 'hard bluegrass' on the bill.
'The time of O Brother actually predates bluegrass,' Skaggs says. 'They had traditional music covered. They wanted more straight bluegrass, so they got me and Del McCoury.'
Followers of Loveless's career say there's little conflict in including her on the tour as well -- particularly on the heels of Mountain Soul, which she put out last summer, to universally positive reviews.
'If they're fans of Patty Loveless, they know I do music like this,' she says. 'Mountain Soul is not a bluegrass record. It's an old-time country record with acoustic instruments.
'I've been doing music on the edge [of traditional]. I've done a Ralph Stanley song ['I'll Never Grow Tired of You'] and a Claire Lynch song ['Some Morning Soon']. I was raised on the music, and I have an understanding of the people who make it.'
Down From the Mountain hopes to continue the understanding -- and appreciation -- of old-time rural music, kicked off by a hit CD as improbable as any Coen brothers plot line.
Back to the mountains: Performers embrace their musical roots
Country stars Ricky Skaggs and Patty Loveless look homeward for inspiration
June 23, 2002BY GREG CRAWFORD FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
They were '50s babies, mountain kids born two counties and 2 1/2 years apart. They grew up in a post-World War II eastern Kentucky where Appalachian traditions were dying along with the coal mines and where out-of-work home folk were packing up in droves and hitting the trail of tears known as U.S.-23 to pursue factory jobs in Ohio and Michigan.
But even as children, Ricky Skaggs and Patty Loveless were different. While school friends and neighbors turned away from the region's past, dreamed of prosperity in Columbus or Detroit and tuned in to the abundant rock 'n' roll of the '60s and early '70s, Skaggs and Loveless were drawn to bluegrass music and the mountain ballads of their ancestors from England, Ireland and Scotland.
Loveless wrote the mournful "Sounds of Loneliness," a tune she still performs, when she was barely into her teens. Skaggs picked up a mandolin for the first time when he was 5, met bluegrass founding father Bill Monroe when he was 6 and was touring and performing with mountain soul man Ralph Stanley by the time he was 15.
This week, they'll be taking the music that is their birthright to the rest of America, as the summer leg of the celebrated "Down from the Mountain" tour of bluegrass and roots-music stars hits the road. The tour, inspired by the overwhelming success of last year's "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack, kicks off Tuesday in Louisville, Ky., then heads north for a Wednesday night show at the DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston.
For Skaggs, 47, the tour and the recent revival of interest in bluegrass and mountain music are validations of his heritage.
"I am so absolutely grateful to God that he allowed me to be born to Hobart and Dorothy Skaggs in Lawrence County in the mountains of eastern Kentucky," says the artist, who dominated mainstream country music in the '80s and won the Country Music Association's entertainer of the year award in 1985.
"There is such healing in this music. It can make you happy. You can't listen to bluegrass and old-time music and not start patting your foot. You just can't do it. We've tried it on people. Everyone failed the test."
Loveless, 45, who put her career in mainstream country music on hold last year to release a stunning album of Appalachian and hard-country tunes, calls "Down from the Mountain" a phenomenon that reflects the times.
"I think a lot of people are wanting to get back to the basics. I really feel that movement," says the singer-songwriter, who was born Patty Ramey, the daughter of a coal miner from Pike County, Ky. "This music gets you back to realism."
Banjos and Frappuccinos
Skaggs chuckles at the irony surrounding the success of the "O Brother" soundtrack.
The album has been a hit with people up north and out west, people who shop on the Internet and hang out in pricey coffeehouses, people who listen to National Public Radio, for heaven's sake. But the folks at the big labels in Nashville, the birthplace of country music, wish it would just go away. They've decided that Shania Twain, Faith Hill and Lonestar are what America should want, and "O Brother" is screwing up their game plan.
"I don't know what causes someone to go to Starbucks and buy a Frappuccino and then go get in their car and put on 'O Brother,' " Skaggs says. "It seems to not fit, but then it does fit because there's something about this music that's so honest and real. It calms the spirit."
It's a lesson he hopes the bigwigs in Nashville are absorbing.
"I wonder if it was about the music," he says of the success of "O Brother." "I wonder if it was the music that made the difference," he continues, obviously peeved at a business that has grown obsessed with sex appeal, packaging, marketing data and focus groups. "It certainly wasn't the promotion. It certainly wasn't CMT (Country Music Television). It certainly wasn't belly rings and tummy tucks and implants. It was completely the opposite of that."
Skaggs wasn't a part of the "O Brother" project, and he wasn't even on the winter portion of the "Down from the Mountain" tour earlier this year. But as heir to the musical tradition begun by Bill Monroe and as bluegrass music's unofficial goodwill ambassador to America, he's a natural fit for the concerts.
More important, he has a lot of credibility with the roots-music crowd for pulling out of mainstream country in the mid-'90s when it grew too bland and pop-oriented for his taste.
He founded his own label, Skaggs Family Records, in 1997 and released "Bluegrass Rules!," the first honest-to-gosh bluegrass recording he had made since he crossed over to country in the early '80s to help launch that decade's wave of so-called new traditionalism. He has since released four other acclaimed albums on his label, including last fall's "History of the Future."
He's at work on a soundtrack of bluegrass and Appalachian music for a Disney film -- "We're pretty fired up about that," he says -- and he's pondering putting together a "Riverdance"-type touring show that would showcase Appalachian culture.
"I want to do a musical performance of mountain-type music with dance, maybe have a storyteller come out for 30 minutes and tell stories," he says. "To me, there's something that's untapped yet in this music."
One career move definitely not in his future is a return to mainstream country music.
"I'm staying put," Skaggs says. "Once you get out of the desert and into the promised land, it's like, 'I don't want to take another lap around the desert.' "
'I just did a record that was fun'
Until a year ago, few people thought of Patty Loveless as anything other than a mainstream country artist. Sure, she recorded hard-country tunes like "You Don't Seem to Miss Me," a celebrated 1997 duet with George Jones, every chance she got. And, yes, her soulful, powerful voice could obliterate most of the midriff-baring female lightweights who got major record deals in Nashville in the '90s.
But Loveless, who made her first album in 1987 and had a long string of '80s and '90s hits, mostly changed with the times in country music, reining in her vocal power and toning down the twang in her voice as needed.
Then, last summer, she and her label, Epic Records, took a gamble and released "Mountain Soul," an all-acoustic collection of hard-country and mountain tunes -- the kind of music Loveless grew up listening to and singing in Kentucky. It performed respectably on the charts, but the response from critics was overwhelming. Some declared it the best country recording of 2001, and most viewed it as the album the singer was born to make.
Loveless was happy with the critical acclaim, but she was even happier to be temporarily free of commercial pressure.
"When I think about 'Strong Heart,' the album I made prior to 'Mountain Soul,' it was just totally different," she says. "It was a record that was made with the thinking: 'You've got to have at least three songs on there that you feel country radio will play.' With 'Mountain Soul,' I didn't think about that. I just did a record that was fun. It was a low-budget record, and we just didn't think about 'How can we get this played?' "
Loveless, like Skaggs, is not on the "O Brother" album, and before the release of "Mountain Soul," few would have considered her a likely candidate for "Down from the Mountain." But the vocal power and feeling she brought to "Mountain Soul" tunes like "Sorrowful Angels," "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive" and Ralph Stanley's "Daniel Prayed" changed perceptions about her almost overnight. So did the down-home touches she brought to the album's packaging: The booklet that accompanies the CD is filled with photos of her Kentucky childhood, and she dedicated "Mountain Soul" to her mother and to her father, who died of black lung disease in 1979.
"It was my idea to pull out all of those old pictures," Loveless says. "I took them to the label and said, 'I'd love to share this collage of pictures with my fans to let them know where I come from, to let them know that this music has been a part of my life for many years.' "
So does "Mountain Soul" represent a change in career direction for the singer?
"Detour is a better word for it," says Loveless, who has just finished work on a Christmas album that she says was "sort of inspired" by "Mountain Soul."
"I'm just bypassing a few things for a while. I've kind of gone back to the basics and wiped the slate clean," she says, choosing her words carefully. "I've been in the studio and cut quite a few songs. I've been listening and observing.
"When I look back at 'Mountain Soul' and this Christmas record and the way everything fell into place, it seems like it was all in the timing. The time was right for it, and it was just meant to be."
